Morphological enhancement of vessel-like structures

Accurate visualization and quantification of the human vasculature is an important prerequisite for a number of clinical procedures. For example, grading of stenoses is important in the diagnosis of the severity of vascular disease since it determines the treatment therapy.

Fig. 1 Vessel enhancement example

The purpose of this project is the development of methods, which based on the socalled max-tree algorithm, can be used for vessel enhancement, see Fig.1.

Fig. 2 Flow diagram

The flow diagram of the technique involved is shown in Fig.2. The dual-input max-tree takes as input two volumetric data sets, the input volume and a so-called mask volume, which can be computed by various methods.

The mask volume should provide connectivity maps, which are used by the max-tree algorithm to reconstruct and eventually reconnect disconnected vessel-like structures. Your task is to develop and experiment with a number of methods which can provide useful masks for the dual-input max-tree algorithm. Some potentially interesting methods are shown in Fig.2. Further details will be provided.

An overview of the dual-input Max-Tree algorithm

The Max-Tree is a hierarchical image representation algorithm introduced in the context of anti-extensive attribute filtering (reducing bright structures) of still images and video sequences. It is a uni-directed, rooted tree in which the node ordering encodes the nesting of peak components. The latter are bounded image regions of intensity above a certain level that are characterized by some notion of connectivity and can be obtained from threshold decomposition of the input signal/image.

Fig.1 - A decomposed image and its Max-Tree representation.

The hierarchical image representation allows for a plethora of binary connected operators, such as attribute filters, to extend directly to the grey-scale domain. Moreover the organization of pixels into connected entities with meaningful attributes allows for efficient ways of image processing requiring far less computational time in comparison to other conventional methods. Attribute filters operated on peak components can either preserve them in their entirety or completely remove them but cannot introduce new edges. This size/shape preserving property makes them particularly attractive for many applications in which precise shape analysis is of crucial importance. An example is the field of biomedical imaging. The Max-Tree algorithm runs a three-stage process in which the construction of the tree and the collection of auxiliary data are separate from filtering and restitution. This flexibility enriches further the application domain and examples can be found in literature. The dual-input Max-Tree algorithm is a variant of the conventional Max-Tree. Its difference resides in the construction phase, which considers two images instead. The purpose for this is to represent image objects based on some generalized notion of image connectivity, often referred to as second-generation connectivity. The first image is the original input image and the second is usually a replica, modified in such a way to either connect or break apart certain connected regions at the original. Both operations may be combined in one image which is referred to as the connectivity mask.

Original (10 objects) Mask (2 objects) Top left cluster Bottom right cluster Fig.2 Clustering example. The original 10 objects have merged in 2 larger structures after a morphological closing. Each of these two new structures will dictate the way objects are connected in the original image, i.e. if any of the top five objects is selected, the operator will extract the cluster rather than that object alone.

When connecting (Fig.2) we essentially consider nearby objects at the original image as being members of a cluster and compute the attributes of this cluster instead. This has been extensively used in biomedical image analysis where in the case of angiography for example small vessel fragments that appear as such due to bad acquisition or noise, often fail the filters criteria and are removed irrecoverably. If clustering is used instead, these are considered as members of the closest dominant structure that survives the filter and thus are preserved Examples are shown below:

Original

filtered

Fig.3 Confocal microscopy 3D pyramidal neuron enhancement

Claimed structures with clustering based connectivity

Original image Filtered Fig.4 Angiography blood vessel enhancement and detection of stenosis

Zoom into the vessel stenosis.

Original image

Claimed structure (red) by employing clustering based connectivity.

Aneurism detection with contraction-based connectivity (dual transformation) Fig.5 Angiography blood vessel enhancement. Top: claimed vessel fragments using attribute filters configured with clustering based connectivity. Bottom: Aneurysm detection using attribute filters configured with contraction-based connectivity.

Original image

Original in X-ray rendering Filtered using clustering-based connectivity Fig.6 Angiography Blood vessel enhancement using attribute filters configured with clustering based connectivity. Small vessel fragments that are evident throughout the volume set are retained because of this connectivity transformation.

The project objective is the development of methods to compute masks from the original volume sets such that directional information are involved. This will constraint the expansion of the original edges towards regions for which there is evidence of the presence of interesting structures. Masks of this type can be utilized in the extraction of structures that were so far irretrievable with conventional methods. An example is the colon of a subject shown in isosurface projection below.

Fig.7 Example application colon extraction from CT scans. The structure visible internally is due to visualization tricks rather than filters.