Patent ID: 6842638

Claim:
An apparatus for producing an angiographic image representation of a subject, the apparatus comprising: an imaging scanner that acquires imaging data from at least a portion of a subject, the imaging data including vascular contrast; a reconstruction processor that reconstructs a three-dimensional image representation from the imaging data, the image representation formed of image elements and exhibiting vascular contrast; and a processor that converts the image representation into an edge-enhanced image representation having enhanced vascular edges and divides the edge-enhanced image representation into a plurality of two-dimensional slices formed of pixels spanning the angiographic image representation, and for each slice: flood-fills the vascular edges to form filled regions defined by pixels having a first value, identifies vessel centers through iterative removal of pixels having the first value from around the edges of the filled regions, and the vessel centers identified being representative of a three-dimensional vascular structure, the processor further segmenting, tracking, extracting, enhancing, or identifying information about the three-dimensional vascular structure using the identified vessel centers as operative inputs.