A novel segmentation method using multiresolution analysis with 3D visualization for X-ray coronary angiogram images

Abstract

Coronary angiography is a widely used tool in the diagnosis and treatment of cardiac diseases. The main cause of coronary artery disease is atherosclerosis, which leads to the narrowing of artery lumen, resulting in decreased blood supply to heart muscles. Determination of narrowing of the lumens mainly depends upon the quality of the segmented image; with improved segmentation technique there is better accuracy in identification of blocks. The main purpose of the paper is to develop an automatic, accurate segmentation technique with 3D visualization for the segmented images. 3D visualization provides clearer information regarding the shape and severity of the lesion. The thresholding technique is one of the oldest and simplest techniques used for segmentation. This paper proposes a multithresholding approach using the entropy measure and multiresolution analysis to ensure automatic and accurate segmentation by overcoming some of the problems encountered in other techniques. Also, segmentation performance analysis was conducted for various segmentation methods. This method is tested with different real coronary angiographic images and was found to perform better than the other techniques.

Keywords:

• Angiogram
• Entropy
• Multiresolution analysis
• 3D visualization
• Multithresholding