This paper describes a fast multi-scale vessel enhancement filter in 3D medical images. For efficient review
of the vascular information, clinicians need rendering the 3D vascular information as a 2D image. Generally,
the maximum intensity projection (MIP) is a useful and widely used technique for producing a 2D image from
the 3D vascular data. However, the MIP algorithm reduces the conspicuousness for small and faint vessels
owing to the overlap of non-vascular structures. To overcome this invisibility, researchers have examined the
multi-scale vessel enhancement filter based on a combination of the eigenvalues of the 3D Hessian matrix. This
multi-scale vessel enhancement filter produces higher contrast. However, it is time-consuming and requires high
cost computation due to large volume of data and complex 3D convolution. For fast vessel enhancement, we
propose a novel multi-scale vessel enhancement filter using 3D integral images and 3D approximated Gaussian
kernel. This approximated kernel looks like cube but it is not exact cube. Each layer of kernel is approximated
2D Gaussian second order derivative by dividing it into three rectangular regions whose sum is integer. 3D
approximated kernel is a pile of these 2D box kernels which are normalized by Frobenius norm. Its size fits to
vessel width in order to achieve better visualization of the small vessel. Proposed method is approximately five
times faster and produces comparable results with previous multi-scale vessel enhancement filter.
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