Vesselness enhancement diffusion

We propose a new anisotropic diffusion filter to enhance the local coherence of multiscale tubular structures on 2D images. The proposed filter uses a diffusion tensor with diffusion direction and strength determined by the local structure, and chooses automatically for each pixel the diffusion tensor scale. In this paper, we show how this filter enhances X-ray coronary angiographic images to facilitate vessel segmentation. To this aim, we present experimental results of the performance of the filter on synthetic and real images. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.