Coronary artery segmentation in X-ray angiogram using Gabor filters and differential evolution

Segmentation of coronary arteries in X-ray angiograms represents an essential task for computer-aided diagnosis, since it can help cardiologists in diagnosing and monitoring vascular abnormalities. Due to the main disadvantages of the X-ray angiograms are the nonuniform illumination, and the weak contrast between blood vessels and image background, different vessel enhancement methods have been introduced. In this paper, a novel method for blood vessel enhancement based on Gabor filters tuned using the optimization strategy of Differential evolution (De) is proposed. Because the Gabor filters are governed by three different parameters, the optimal selection of those parameters is highly desirable in order to maximize the vessel detection rate while reducing the computational cost of the training stage. To obtain the optimal set of parameters for the Gabor filters, the area (Az) under the receiver operating characteristic curve is used as objective function. In the experimental results, the proposed method obtained the highest detection performance with Az = 0.956 using a test set of 60 angiograms, and Az = 0.934 with a training set of 20 angiograms compared with different state-of-the-art vessel detection methods. In addition, the experimental results in terms of computational time have also shown that the proposed method can be highly suitable for clinical decision support. (Author)