A Benchmark Framework for Multiregion Analysis of Vesselness Filters

Vessel enhancement (aka vesselness) filters, are part of angiographic image processing for more than twenty years. Their popularity comes from their ability to enhance tubular structures while filtering out other structures, especially as a preliminary step of vessel segmentation. Choosing the right vesselness filter among the many available can be difficult, and their parametrization requires an accurate understanding of their underlying concepts and a genuine expertise. In particular, using default parameters is often not enough to reach satisfactory results on specific data. Currently, only few benchmarks are available to help the users choosing the best filter and its parameters for a given application. In this article, we present a generic framework to compare vesselness filters. We use this framework to compare seven gold standard filters. Our experiments are performed on three public datasets: the hepatic Ircad dataset (CT images), the Bullit dataset (brain MRA images) and the synthetic VascuSynth dataset. We analyse the results of these seven filters both quantitatively and qualitatively. In particular, we assess their performances in key areas: the organ of interest, the whole vascular network neighbourhood and the vessel neighbourhood split into several classes, based on their diameters. We also focus on the vessels bifurcations, which are often missed by vesselness filters. We provide the code of the benchmark, which includes up-to-date C++ implementations of the seven filters, as well as the experimental setup (parameter optimization, result analysis, etc.). An online demonstrator is also provided to help the community apply and visually compare these vesselness filters.