Improved Hessian multiscale enhancement filter

Traditional Hessian multiscale filter consider only the local geometric feature but not the global grayscale infor- mation. In medical image analysis, Hessian filter is usually used to enhance the blood vessels. However, it also produces some pseudo vascular structures or some isolate noise points, such as the nasal soft tissues that have the similar shape with the vessels in MRA data, which will increase the difficulty of cerebrovascular segmentation. To resolve this issue, an im- proved Hessian multiscale filter is proposed in this paper. An image grayscale factor is added to the vascular similarity func- tion computed by Hessian matrix eigenvalue. This method is experimented on brain MRA data and lung CTA data. Experi- mental results show that this method can enhance vascular structures, and simultaneously reduce the appearance of the pseu- do vascular structures and the isolated noise points.