Semi‐automated software for the three‐dimensional delineation of complex vascular networks

Summary The understanding of tumour angiogenesis is of great importance in cancer research, as is the tumour response to vascular‐targeted drugs. This paper presents software aimed at aiding these investigations and other situations where linear or dendritic structures are to be delineated from three‐dimensional (3D) data sets. This software application was written to analyse the data from 3D data sets by allowing the manual and semi‐automated tracking and delineation of the vascular tree, including the measurement of vessel diameter. A new algorithm, CHARM, based on a compact Hough transform and the formation of a radial map, has been used to locate vessel centres and measure diameters automatically. The robustness of this algorithm to image smoothing and noise has been investigated.