Region-based Vessel Segmentation Using Level Set Framework

This paper presents a novel region-based snake method for vessel segmentation. According to geometric shape analysis of the vessel structure with different scale, an efficient statistical estimation of vessel branches is introduced into the energy objective function, which applies not only the vessel intensity information, but also geometric information of line-like structure in the image. The defined energy function is minimized using the gradient descent method and a new region-based speed function is obtained, which is more accurate to the vessel structure and not sensitive to the initial condition. The narrow band algorithm in the level set framework implements the proposed method, the solution of which is steady. The segmentation experiments are shown on several images. Compared with other geometric active contour models, the proposed method is more efficient and robust.