METHOD AND SYSTEM FOR VESSEL ENHANCEMENT AND ARTIFACT REDUCTION IN TOF MR ANGIOGRAPHY OF BRAIN

A method and system for vessel enhancement and artifact reduction in a 3D time-of-flight (TOF) magnetic resonance (MR) angiography brain image. An intensity-based threshold is used to extract structures of interest in the brain image. Vessels are isolated in the structures of interest by filtering the structures based on a vesselness measure. The vessels are then enhanced by multiplying the filtered image by a coefficient map based on intensities of the original brain image. The scalp is detected in the enhanced image, and the scalp is removed from the enhanced image to generate a noise-reduce enhanced image.