A new strategy to obtain robust markers for blood vessels segmentation by using the watersheds method.

The watersheds method is a powerful segmentation tool developed in mathematical morphology. In order to prevent its over-segmentation, in this paper, we present a new strategy to obtain robust markers for segmentation of blood vessels from malignant tumors. For this purpose, we introduced a new algorithm. We propose a two-stage segmentation strategy which involves: (1) extracting an approximate region containing the blood vessel and part of the background near the blood vessel, and (2) segmenting the blood vessel from the background within this region. The approach effectively reduces the influence of peripheral background intensities on the extraction of a blood vessel region. In this application the important information to be extracted from images is only the number of blood vessels present in the images. The proposed strategy was tested on manual segmentation, where segmentation errors less than 10% for false positives and 0% for false negatives are observed. It is demonstrated by extensive experimentation, by using real images, that the proposed strategy was suitable for our application in the environment of a personal computer.