Three dimensional vessel extraction model based on tubular characters and active contour model
管状特性和主动轮廓的3维血管自动提取

In this paper, we propose a nevo model for three dimensional vessel extraction. The model makes full use of tubular properties, which includes prior intensity of vessels, second tensor of tubular structures, and geometric curvatures. All this information makes the energy terms of the active contour model and thus leads to three forces of the iterative equation: the region competition force using prior intensity, the tubular vector field force and the dual curvature force. The first force help extracting big vessels accurately and robustly, the second force makes it possible to extract thin and weak vessels, and the last one is able to remove noise without changing the tubular geometry. As shown in the experiments extracting liver vessels, coronary, and lung vessels, the proposed model is able to extract the whole vessel trees automatically, accurately, and robustly.