The New Jersey Institute of Technology's
Electronic Theses & Dissertations Project

Title:	Contour extraction from HVEM image of microvessel using active contour models
Author:	Xiao, Manping
View Online:	njit-etd1994-142 (viii, 46 pages ~ 2.6 MB pdf)
Department:	Biomedical Engineering Committee
Degree:	Master of Science
Program:	Biomedical Engineering
Document Type:	Thesis
Advisory Committee:	Shi, Yun Q. (Committee chair) Kristol, David S. (Committee member) Horn, L. (Committee member)
Date:	1994-01
Keywords:	High voltage electron microscopes. Image processing -- Digital techniques Blood-vessels -- Data processing Microcirculation -- Data processing
Availability:	Unrestricted
Abstract:	This thesis reports the research results on automatic contour extraction from high voltage electron microscope (HVEM) image of thick cross section montages of small blood vessels. The previous work on this subject, which was based on the conventional edge detection operations combined with edge linking, has proven inadequate to describe the inner structural compartments of microvessels. In this thesis, an active contour model (commonly referred to as "Snakes") has been applied to advance the previous work. Active contour models have proven themselves to be a powerful and flexible paradigm for many problems in image understanding, especially in contour extraction from medical images. With the developed energy functions, the active contour is attracted towards the edges under the action of internal forces (describing some elasticity properties of the contour), image forces and external forces by means of minimization of the energy functions. Based on this active model, an effective algorithm is implemented as a powerful tool for 2-D contour extraction in our problem for the first time. The results thus obtained turn out to be encouraging.