An Efficient Technique for Detection and Enhancement of Blood Vessels from Cardiac MRI

Abstract

Cardiovascular diseases, mainly caused by stenosis or aneurysms of arteries, are the leading reasons of death worldwide. Angiography, which is not only invasive but also risky, painful and costly, is the common method for the recognition of such diseases. However presently non-invasive and radiation free cardiac MRI is being used to evaluate the function and anatomy of the heart chambers, heart valves and blood flow through major vessels. The morphology, formation and plaque buildup conditions of blood vessels indicates diseases such as heart attack, stroke, angina, arrhythmias, heart failure etc. Thus, the vessels needs to be identified properly and clearly. In this paper, cardiac MRI is used for accurate extraction and enhancement of blood vessel, emphasizing upon the minor and somewhat discontinuous vessels. MRI technique in this field was less explored and is very challenging because of poor contrast difference between the vessels and organs and mentionable amount of noise. The detection process uses both morphological operators and image gradient characteristics. The result obtained by using morphological operators has better effectiveness in terms of noise reduction and accuracy.