RECONSTRUCTING THE 3-D MEDIAL AXES OF CORONARY-ARTERIES IN SINGLE-VIEW CINEANGIOGRAMS

We describe a technique for reconstructing the skeletal structure of coronary arteries from a succession of frames of a single-view cineangiogram. We use local features in each frame to determine correspondences of arterial segments in successive frames. We define a similarity measure in 2-D image space as the change in angular coordinates of corresponding pairs. We use a form of gradient descent to find those depth coordinates that minimize the average deviation of the 3-D angular coordinates of all points on the skeleton from the coordinates produced by a 3-D scaling transformation. In experiments with software models the reconstruction error was approximately two pixels when the initial guessed reconstruction was as large as 30 pixels.