Patent ID: 8818061

Claim:
A method for characterizing a blood vessel represented by vascular image data from a DICOM-image, wherein said vascular image data comprises a plurality of voxels each having an image intensity, said method comprising: identifying a set of voxels representing at least a portion of a boundary of the blood vessel; determining a gradient vector of the image intensity for each voxel in said set of voxels representing the boundary of the blood vessel; selecting, from said set of voxels representing the boundary of the blood vessel, a subset of voxels such that all voxels in said subset of voxels have a common intersection point for their respective gradient vector extensions; and determining a vector product based on said gradient vectors for said subset of voxels, wherein the common intersection point indicates a center of said blood vessel and said vector product indicates a direction in which said blood vessel extends, and the method further comprising: iteratively selecting an additional subset of voxels from said set of voxels representing the boundary of the blood vessel, wherein all voxels in said additional subset of voxels have a common intersection point for their respective gradient vector extensions and the common intersection point indicates a possible center point of said blood vessel; finding a plurality of possible center points of said blood vessel; selecting a voxel that corresponds to one of the center points as a starting point for the blood vessel; and tracing the blood vessel path by iteratively: identifying a possible center point that is located in a plane that is orthogonal to the direction of the blood vessel wherein said plane extends through a voxel that is located within a predetermined range from the current center point in a direction of the blood vessel; and including the identified possible center point in the blood vessel path.