Blood Vessel Enhancement by Directed Diffusion

In this paper, a blood vessel in an angiographic image, which plays an importance role in the diagnose diseases including in the eyes, brain and heart, is enhanced by using a directed diffusion technique. A fundamental component of the angiographic analysis is vessel segmentation that the proposed method provides a preprocessing of the image into a form suitable for human analysis, or more importantly, for machine analysis such the segmentation. Vessel enhancement is a challenging problem due to the complex nature of vascular trees and to imaging imperfections. Some parts of the inherent imperfections in angiography are the intensity inhomogeneity between the larger and smaller vessels, and another imperfection is the leakage of contrast agent into the background tissue that provides to low contrast between vessels and tissue. In the proposed scheme, the directed diffusion solves the problem by formulating a local geometric structure, which consists of direction and scale of the blood vessels. The diffusion process uses the local structure to enhance by a diffusivity tensor. The proposed algorithm can be applied to maintain sharpness and coherence-smooth the intra-regions into homogeneity better than traditional diffusion methods, which are Gaussian regulation and coherence enhancing diffusion.