Coronary Artery Disease (CAD) is one of the most prevalent causes of death in the world. X-ray angiography is considered as the gold standard for the assessment of coronaries stenosis. The processing of these images is still a challenging task due to complex background and different movements of each image element. This thesis attempts to build a fully automatic framework to extract and interpret coronary arteries in x-ray coronary angiograms. At first, some useful mathematical tools for image processing such as partial differential equations and various models are presented and the relations and connection among these tools are discussed. Accordingly, Mumford and Shah model is selected for segmentation. It is shown that available justify; LINE-HEIGHT: 115%; MARGIN: 0cm -0.9pt 10pt 0cm" Keywords : coronary artery, x-ray angiogram, vessel segmentation, energy function, the best images
