The study of the morphological and rheological behaviors of intramural vessels plays a critical role in various clinical applications such as surgical planning and radiotherapy. To better understand the rheological behavior of vascular structures in relation to the network morphology, we must obtain the quantitative measurements of the morphometric parameters of the vascular networks under various conditions. Morphometric parameters of the networks include vessel diameter, distance between branching points of vessels, and branching complexity. Because of the morphological complexity of blood vessels, however, it is difficult to obtain accurate measurements. In this paper, we present a novel and efficient method for skeletonization of curvilinear object. The proposed method automatically skeletonizes the vascular network in a given image and constructs a graph that represents the branching structures of the network. Since the method processes a given image as a whole, the multiple vascular networks present in the image are automatically detected and skeletonized simultaneously. Moreover, since the skeletons are represented as graph structures, various morphometric parameters are obtained automatically. We also present the very promising results of the method applied to the complex blood vessel networks in various retinal images.
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