Patent ID: 7983459

Claim:
A method of creating a blood vessel tree from imaging data, the method comprising: (a) receiving a blood vessel object identified from imaging data; (b) selecting a starting point of the received blood vessel object; (c) calculating a width map for the received blood vessel object; (d) identifying an exit point for the received blood vessel object; (e) calculating a distance map relative to the identified exit point for the received candidate vessel object, wherein the distance map is weighted by the width values of the width map; (f) identifying an endpoint during calculation of the distance map; (g) backtracking from the identified endpoint to the selected starting point to define a path in a vessel tree; (h) repeating (g) for each identified endpoint to create a vessel tree for the blood vessel object; and filtering the identified endpoint if the identified endpoint is not a local maxima based on a distance to the selected starting point.