2010 International Conference on Pattern Recognition
Length increasing active contour for the segmentation of small blood vessels
D. Rivest-Hénault, M. Cheriet
Synchromedia laboratory
École de technologie supérieure
Montréal, Québec, Canada
{dhenault,mcheriet}@synchromedia.ca
Abstract
A new level-set based active contour method for the
segmentation of small blood vessels and other elon-
gated structures is presented. Its main particularity is
the presence of a length increasing force in the contour
driving equation. The effect of this force is to push the
active contour in the direction of thin elongated shapes.
Although the proposed force is not stable in general,
our experiments show that with few precautions it can
successfully be integrated in a practical segmentation
scheme and that it helps to segment a longer part of
the structures of interest. For the segmentation of blood
vessels, this may reduce the amount of user interactiv-
ity needed: only a small region inside the structure of
interest need to be specified.
1 Introduction
Vessel segmentation is an important step in many
clinical situations. Carefully segmented structures can
serve to enhance CTA data visualization, support diag-
nostic and helps surgical guidance and decision. For
example, in certain severe cases of tetralogy of Fallot
or pulmonary atresia, lung perfusion relies totally or in
part on one or more major aorto-pulmonary collateral
arteries (MAPCAs). Since those structures show signif-
icant variation in shape, position and number, they are
difficult to visualize without a proper segmentation [7].
Recently, a number of methods have been proposed
for either vessel-like structures enhancement [3, 6] or
segmentation [4, 9, 5]. The latter are well known level
set-based methods that must be initialized close to the
expected position of the structures of interest, a process
that can be both tedious and error-prone. For example,
Lorigo et al.[4] use a thresholding of the dataset that
may be sensible to noise or may not be specific enough
for some applications. In the paper by van Bemmel
1051-4651/10 $26.00 © 2010 IEEE
DOI 10.1109/ICPR.2010.685
S. Deschênes, C. Lapierre
Sainte-Justine Hospital
Montréal, Québec, Canada
sylvain.deschenes@recherche-ste-justine.qc.ca
chantal lapierre@ssss.gouv.qc.ca
et al.[9], written in the context of artery–vein separa-
tion, the center line of each vessel of interest must be
extracted using a supervised minimum-cost path algo-
rithm. Finally, in Manniesing et al.[5], the initialization
is provided by using only few manually provided seed
points, but the authors note that their method have diffi-
culties in segmenting the (smaller) peripheral vessels.
A common limiting factor of many level set-based
methods is the presence of a viscosity term in the driv-
ing equation. While this term is most of the time nec-
essary to ensure the smooth delineation of the structure
or to prevent unwanted leakage of the boundaries, it im-
pairs significantly the displacement of the interface [5].
For thin elongated structures, it is our intuition that new
geometric priors on the shape of the contour must be
considered.
Geometric active contours The most frequently en-
countered smoothness term in level set segmentation
equation is the mean curvature force. Given an active
contour C in RN , the motion by mean curvature with
respect to an artificial time variable t is given by
∂C
= −νκ~n, (1)
∂t
where ν ∈ R is a parameter, κ is the mean curvature and
~n is the unit normal. From a variational point of view,
this PDE can be seen as the gradient descent equation
for the minimization of the length dependent energy
Z
E = ν |C(s))|ds (2)
subject to the L2 inner product [2, 8]. From (1) and (2),
it is clear that if ν > 0, then the minimization of (2)
with respect to C by a gradient descent would progres-
sively decrease the total contour length. Conversely, if
ν < 0, the total length of C would be increased. It has
been suggested by Sundaramoorthi et al. in [8] that a
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length increasing active contour may be useful for the
segmentation of blood vessel. Unfortunately, it is well
known that the minimization of (2) when ν < 0 by fol-
lowing (1) is not numerically stable [8], see Fig. 1a)-
c). In order to obtain better behaved flow, some authors
[2, 8] have investigated the use of inner products differ-
ent from L2 for the minimization of geometric energy
functional. In particular, the Sobolev Active Contour
[8] seems a promising candidate for the segmentation
of elongated structures. However, for the time being,
practical computational methods for this type of active
contour have only been defined in 2D and are there-
fore of limited use for 3D CTA data segmentation. An-
other possibility suggested by Charpiat et al. in [2] is
to smooth the gradient during the curve evolution. This
idea has been illustrated later by Sundaramoorthi et al.
in [8]. Although, this produce better looking results, the
flow stays numerically unstable[2, 8]. For this reason,
those authors did not explore this idea in more details.
In this paper, we propose a method for the segmenta-
tion of elongated structures, such as blood vessels, that
includes a length increasing term obtained by a smooth-
ing of the directed curvature vectors. The length in-
creasing term presented here depends only on the ge-
ometry of the active contour and is completely indepen-
dent of the image data. In this respect, the proposed
approach is fundamentally different from filter-based
methods such as [3, 6]. In practice, it is beneficial and
leads to improved segmentation results.
2 Methodology
2.1 Smoothed Length Increasing Flow
A length increasing flow can be defined by smooth-
ing the κ~n vector field of (1) with a Gaussian kernel Gσ
of scale σ, as follows:
∂C
= +(Gσ ∗ κ~n)~n. (3)
∂t
The convolution of the kernel is conducted component-
wise on the oriented curvature vector field κ~n, so vec-
tors in opposite directions can cancel each other. Fol-
lowing our observations this flow is still too unstable to
serve for practical purposes. A solution is to combine
(1) with (3) to obtain are more well behaved flow.
∂C
= α(Gσ ∗ κ~n)~n − νκ~n. (4)
∂t
Here, α ∈ R+ and ν ∈ R+ are parameters balancing the
two forces. The terms of (4) act on two scales: at large
scale, (Gσ ∗ κ~n)~n tends to increase the contour length
and, at a finer scale, −κ~n tends to keep the contour
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(a) (b) (c) (d)
Figure 1: Some geometric flows: a) initial contour, and
the effect of b) a length decreasing flow, c) the tradi-
tional length increasing flow, and d) the proposed length
increasing flow.
smooth. The effect of using this flow on an actual con-
tour is illustrated on Fig. 1d. We stress that depending
of the choice of parameters α and ν, this flow can still be
numerically unstable, but that it is well behaved enough
for practical applications. The width of the “branches”
that grow by using (4) depends on the scale parameter σ
of the Gaussian kernel. Thus, this one should be chosen
in function of the smallest structure to be segmented. It
is worth noting that it is possible to segment large ves-
sels using a small σ since nothing prevents the merging
of small branches during the segmentation process.
2.2 Vessel Segmentation Models
The length increasing flow of (4) can be embed-
ded in many existing active contour segmentation tech-
niques. A first possibility is to complement our length
increasing method with the model from [1]. In this case,
the curve evolution equation for vessel segmentation is
written as follows:
∂C
= [(u − µs )2 − (u − µb )2 ]~n + α(Gσ ∗ κ~n)~n − νκ~n,
∂t
(5)
where u := u(x) represents the voxel intensities at a
position x. The parameters µ{ s, b}, are estimated from
the image and the position of the contour at each given
time moment t. The effectiveness of (5) as a segmenta-
tion model is illustrated in Fig. 2 where it is compared
with a segmentation result obtained with the Chan and
Vese model (i.e. (5) with α = 0) on an artificial ves-
sel image. Both methods used the same initialization
and the same value for ν. It is clear that our method
succeeds in capturing the whole vessel while the other
stalls due to the contour viscosity. Also, Fig. 3 shows
some details of the G ∗ κ~n vectors at the point where
the Chan and Vese contour stalled.
This model, however, is not well-suited for the seg-
mentation of unimodal objects from a multimodal back-
ground. For this kind of problem, one solution is to use
a Gaussian intensity distribution model for the struc-
tures of interest and a uniform distribution for the back-
ground. This scheme share some similarities with the
one in [5]. In this case, it is possible to define the curve
Figure 2: Segmentation of a synthetic image. 1) Result
with the Chan and Vese method, and 2) result with our
(a) (b) (c) (d)
method. The blue curve represent the initialization.
Figure 4: Vessel segmentation, image taken from [8]:
a) input image, b) initialization, c) segmentation with
(6) without the length increasing term (α = 0), and
d) segmentation with (6).

Figure 3: Illustration of the oriented curvature term.
Left) Quiver plots of the smoothed curvature vectors
G ∗ κ~n close to the interface. This corresponds to the
yellow dashed area of Fig. 2. Right) Illustration of the
modulus of the curvature |G ∗ κ~n| for the whole image.
of C. Regions where φ(x) ≥ 0 corresponds to the ob-
ject of interest while its complement corresponds to the
background. Starting from initial position φ(x, t = 0),
the equation for evolving the curves C with respect to
t, with force F acting along the normal direction, is [1]:
∂t = |∇φ|F, where F can be composed from the fol-
∂φ

lowing terms, depending on the case:

evolution equation as
  Fsmooth = −νκ, Fincreasing = α(Gσ ∗ κ~n)~n,
∂C ps (u) − pb (u)
= ~n + α(Gσ ∗ κ~n)~n − νκ~n, (6) FCV = [(u − cs )2 − (u − cb )2 ], and
∂t ps (u) + pb (u)  
 
ps (u) − pb (u)
(u−µ)2
FGU = .
− ps (u) + pb (u)
with ps = ks e , pb = kb and ks , kb ∈ R+ .
2σ 2
i

Other intensity distributions may also be envisioned.
The use of (6) as a vessel segmentation method will be
illustrated in Sec. 3.
2.3 Adaptive Model for Vessel Segmentation
As indicated in Sec. 2.1 and although we think it is
not a practical problem, the length increasing flow of
The normal vectors can be computed by using ~n =
∇φ/|∇φ|. As for the curvature, κ, it can be computed
in 2D by using the formula for the mean curvature,
κ = ∇ · (∇φ/|∇φ|) [1]. In 3D, the formulation by
Lorigo et al.[4] has been used. Finally, the effect of var-
ious forces on the lsf are restricted to regions close to
the zero level φ(x, t) = 0 by using the regularized Dirac
function from [1]: δφ = π1 (1+φ 1
2 ) . As an example, the

(4) can be numerically unstable in some circumstances. level set evolution equation used for (6) in the case of
If this is a concern for an application, the modulus of 2D segmentation is:
the smoothed curvature term, h := |Gσ ∗ κ~n|, may still    
∂φ ps (u) − pb (u) ∇φ
serve as an indicator function for highly curved region = δφ × − ν∇ · (7)
∂t ps (u) + pb (u) |∇φ|
at scale σ. Therefore, the influence of the curvature mo-     
tion in those areas can be reduced by using a monotoni- ∇φ ∇φ ∇φ
+ α G∗∇· · .
cally decreasing function that depends on h. For exam- |∇φ| |∇φ| |∇φ|
ple, by removing α(Gσ ∗ κ~n)~n from (4), (5) or (6) and
by using ν · exp(|Gσ ∗ κ~n|) · κ~n in place of νκ~n. 3 Experiments with 2D and 3D images
2.4 Level Set Implementation The performance of the vessel segmentation model
(6) is first demonstrated on a vessel image taken from
The curve propagation equations from (1), (4), (5) [8], see Fig. 4. The parameters for the pixel intensity
and (6) have been implemented using the level set distribution models were estimated from the initial po-
framework. Within this framework, a set of closed sition of the contour, illustrated in Fig. 4-b). Other pa-
curves C on Ω ⊂ RN , N ∈ {2, 3} is represented by the rameters were hand-picked by trial and error. In a first
intersection of a surface φ(r) : Ω → RN +1 and of the attempt, the parameter α was set to zero, effectively
zero level. By convention, φ(x), called Level Set Func- canceling out the length increasing force, and the oth-
tion (lsf ), is approximately a signed distance function ers as follows: ν = 4 and σ = 8. The contour was

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Figure 5: 2D segmentation on a slice from a CTA vol-
ume. Top row: input image and initialization, bottom
row: results using (6) without (left) and with (right) our
length increasing term.
evolved until it stagnates. In a second attempt, we re-
peat the same procedure, but with α = 12 × ν. With-
out our length increasing term, it was impossible to seg-
ment the smaller vessel. A similar experiment was also
conducted on a 2D MPR view of a 3D CTA dataset, as
shown on Fig. 5. Here, we wanted to segment the aorta
and the surrounding vasculature for surgical planning
purposes [7]. The parameters for the intensity model
were also estimated from the initial contour position
and we used the same value for the other parameters.
Again, our length increasing term allowed the contour
to progress farther in thin elongated structures. Finally,
the effectiveness of our method was demonstrated in 3D
on a CTA dataset. The initial position of the contour
was given by 8 spherical seeds placed by a user inside
the aorta and surrounding vasculature. The results are
shown in Fig. 6 and are an indication that our length
increasing term performs well in 3D.
4 Conclusion
A practical length increasing active contour model
has been introduced in this paper. Preliminary exper-
iments on both 2D and 3D datasets indicate that our
new model greatly improves the propagation of the con-
tour through thin elongated structures. Although this
method can be numerically unstable in theory, it appears
to be well behaved in practice as this didn’t cause any
problem during our experiments. In future works, we
plan to conduct theoretical analysis of the stability con-
ditions. Also, a formal evaluation of our segmentation
model for aorta and MAPCAs segmentation in clinical
situations will be done.
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Figure 6: Aorta and MAPCAs segmentation on a 3D
CTA volume without (top row) and with (bottom row)
our length increasing term.
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