Vessel segmentation in angiograms using hysteresis thresholding

Angiography (i.e. vessel imaging after the injection of a radiopaque substance) is a widely used procedure for vessel observation in both clinical routine and medical research. Often for the subsequent analysis of the vasculature it is needed to measure the angiogram area covered by vessels and/or the vessel length. For this purpose we need vessel enhancement and segmentation. While there are already many organ specific vessel segmentation algorithms, we propose in this contribution a more general method which includes a Hessian supported vessel enhancement step followed by segmentation based on the hysteresis threshold paradigm.