Centerline Tracking of the Single Coronary Artery from X-ray Angiograms

Accurate determination of physiology and morphology of individual coronary artery is a prerequisite for its quantification as well as for planning procedures such as angioplasty. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a semi-automatic method for centerline extraction and tracking of the single coronary artery. Our approach is based on ridge edge detection and thresholding, after which the centerline of a vessel tree is extracted using skeletonization. After that, we manually select two points: at the start and the end of the single coronary artery. Finding the shortest path between selected points is used for single coronary centerline extraction. Finally, the template matching of selected points allows centerline tracking through the whole sequence. Obtained results show successful centerline extraction and tracking with satisfactory accuracy, precision, sensitivity and F1-score, of 81%, 79%, 81% and 0.76, respectively.