Contrast-independent curvilinear structure enhancement in 3D biomedical images

Abstract

A wide range of biomedical applications require detection, quantification and modelling of curvilinear structures in 3D images. Here we propose a 3D contrast-independent approach to enhance curvilinear structures based on the 3D Phase Congruency Tensor concept. The results show that the proposed method is insensitive to intensity variations along the 3D curve, and provides successful enhancement within noisy regions. The quality of the 3D Phase Congruency Tensor is evaluated by comparing it with state-of-the-art intensity-based approaches on both synthetic and real biological images.