Spherical operator classification for coronary artery extraction

Computed tomography angiography (CTA) is a major noninvasive technology for imaging coronary artery disease, and effective and accurate vessel tracking method can help radiologists diagnose the disease more accurately. In this paper, a novel 3D vessel tracking method based on CTA data is presented. The method is comprised of preprocessing, a novel spherical operator, and hierarchical clustering, where the spherical operator consists of rays that are casted different directions in a spherical coordinate system. The vascular boundary is extracted by the spherical operator, and the tracking direction is also obtained by the hierarchical clustering. The method is evaluated with the Rotterdam Coronary Artery Algorithm Evaluation Framework. Results indicate that our method outperforms current state-of-the-Art methods in terms of the overlap ratio on the vessel tracking of coronary arteries in CTA data.