A multi-scale method for extraction of cerebral blood vessles

Segmentation is one of the most challenging problems in the field of medical image analysis, and blood vessels are especially difficult to extract. In this paper, we propose a novel method for segmentation of cerebral blood vessels from magnetic resonance angiography (MRA) images based on Frangi's vesselness measure and ball B-Spline. First, we apply Frangi's vesselness measure to find putative centerlines of tubular structures along with their estimated radii. Then the ball B-Spline method is adopted to construct the 3D vascular trees. Results on head MRA datasets demonstrate the availability of the method.