Recent research suggests that the cardiovascular diseases (CVDs), seem to be the foremost cause of mortality among the world populace. Three dimensional (3D) imaging modality such as computed tomography angiography(CTA) is a standard noninvasive imaging modality which has great potentials for the visualization of heart and coronary arteries. This article presents a fully automated method for coronary artery extraction using modified Frangi's vesselness measure and region based segmentation. In this article, grayness and gradient based measures are used while computing Frangi's vesselness measure to improve the extraction of coronary arteries. The obtained vesselness measures are utilized for automatically computing the location of ostia. The locations of ostia are then used as starting seed points in region growing segmentation to extract coronary arteries. Three major coronary arteries, namely the left anterior descending artery (LAD), left circumflex artery (LCX) and right coronary artery (RCA) are segmented using the proposed method and the centerlines are extracted for the main coronary branches. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated using 12 3D CCTA data set. The experimental results reveal that during the calculation of modified Frangi's vesselness measure the proposed method gives improved results. The qualitative results obtained during the segmentation stage are also convincing. The average segmentation accuracy and overlap measure of the proposed method are 97.4% and 77.86%, respectively. Hence, the proposed automated approach can detect and extract coronary arteries in CCTA images with high performance.

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