Back-propagation network and its configuration for blood vessel detection in angiograms.

A neural-network classifier for detecting vascular structures in angiograms was developed. The classifier consisted of a multilayer feedforward network window in which the center pixel was classified using gray-scale information within the window. The network was trained by using the backpropagation algorithm with the momentum term. Based on this image segmentation problem, the effect of changing network configuration on the classification performance was also characterized. Factors including topology, rate parameters, training sample set, and initial weights were systematically analyzed. The training set consisted of 75 selected points from a 256x256 digitized cineangiogram. While different network topologies showed no significant effect on performance, both the learning process and the classification performance were sensitive to the rate parameters. In a comparative study, the network demonstrated its superiority in classification performance. It was also shown that the trained neural-network classifier was equivalent to a generalized matched filter with a nonlinear decision tree.