Robust Implementation of Foreground Extraction and Vessel Segmentation for X-ray Coronary Angiography Image Sequence

The extraction of contrast-filled vessels from X-ray coronary angiography(XCA) image sequence has important clinical significance for intuitively diagnosis and therapy. In this study, XCA image sequence O is regarded as a three-dimensional tensor input, vessel layer H is a sparse tensor, and background layer B is a low-rank tensor. Using tensor nuclear norm(TNN) minimization, a novel method for vessel layer extraction based on tensor robust principal component analysis(TRPCA) is proposed. Furthermore, considering the irregular movement of vessels and the dynamic interference of surrounding irrelevant tissues, the total variation(TV) regularized spatial-temporal constraint is introduced to separate the dynamic background E. Subsequently, for the vessel images with uneven contrast distribution, a two-stage region growth(TSRG) method is utilized for vessel enhancement and segmentation. A global threshold segmentation is used as the pre-processing to obtain the main branch, and the Radon-Like features(RLF) filter is used to enhance and connect broken minor segments, the final vessel mask is constructed by combining the two intermediate results. We evaluated the visibility of TV-TRPCA algorithm for foreground extraction and the accuracy of TSRG algorithm for vessel segmentation on real clinical XCA image sequences and third-party database. Both qualitative and quantitative results verify the superiority of the proposed methods over the existing state-of-the-art approaches.