Adaptive thresholding of digital subtraction angiography images

Abstract

In clinical practice, digital subtraction angiography (DSA) is a powerful technique for the visualization of blood vessels in the human body. Blood vessel segmentation is a main problem for 3D vascular reconstruction. In this paper, we propose a new adaptive thresholding method for the segmentation of DSA images. Each pixel of the DSA images is declared to be a vessel/background point with regard to a threshold and a few local characteristic limits depending on some information contained in the pixel neighborhood window. The size of the neighborhood window is set according to a priori knowledge of the diameter of vessels to make sure that each window contains the background definitely. Some experiments on cerebral DSA images are given, which show that our proposed method yields better results than global thresholding methods and some other local thresholding methods do.