Segmentation of Coronary Angiograms Using Gabor Filters and Boltzmann Univariate Marginal Distribution Algorithm

This paper presents a novel method for improving the training step of the single-scale Gabor filters by using the Boltzmann univariate marginal distribution algorithm (BUMDA) in X-ray angiograms. Since the single-scale Gabor filters (SSG) are governed by three parameters, the optimal selection of the SSG parameters is highly desirable in order to maximize the detection performance of coronary arteries while reducing the computational time. To obtain the best set of parameters for the SSG, the area (Az ) under the receiver operating characteristic curve is used as fitness function. Moreover, to classify vessel and nonvessel pixels from the Gabor filter response, the interclass variance thresholding method has been adopted. The experimental results using the proposed method obtained the highest detection rate with Az = 0.9502 over a training set of 40 images and Az = 0.9583 with a test set of 40 images. In addition, the experimental results of vessel segmentation provided an accuracy of 0.944 with the test set of angiograms.