Patent ID: 8488852

Claim:
A medical imaging system for segmenting an original blood vessel of a body part represented by an original medical image, comprising: an image analyzer adapted to receive and analyze the original medical image for providing a Hessian Eigen analysis comprising a first data and a second data mapped to each pixel of the original medical image; an image identifier adapted to receive the Hessian Eigen analysis for identifying seed points from the pixel by processing the first data and the second data along with a vesselness property; a directional vector integrator adapted to integrate the first data mapped to the each pixel of the original medical image to provide a directional vector; an end detector adapted to identify ends of the original blood vessel using the vesselness property and the directional vector; a blood vessel generator adapted to generate first level pruned blood vessels by using the vesselness property, the directional vector, and the ends detected by the end detector; a length and density map generator adapted to generate a length and density map using the first level pruned blood vessels, the length and density map comprising a length of the first level pruned blood vessels and number of the first level pruned blood vessels passing through pixels on the first level pruned blood vessels; a centerline generator module adapted to generate a centerline by using the length and density map; an image generator adapted to generate a partially pruned medical image representing second level pruned blood vessels by using the centerline; a set identifier adapted to receive a series of the partially pruned medical image at different locations during different time intervals of a physiological cycle of the body part and to identify a set of the partially pruned medical images in a same phase of the physiological cycle of the body part; and an image comparator adapted to compare the partially pruned medical images in the set with each other and to provide the corrected medical image representing the corrected blood vessel based on the comparison, wherein the seed points are used for segmenting the original blood vessel to provide a corrected medical image representing a corrected blood vessel.