A method of coronary vessel segmentation and visualization includes providing a digitized coronary image, placing a plurality of seed points along an estimated centerline of a coronary vessel, selecting a seed point and constructing a cyclic graph around the seed point in a plane perpendicular to the centerline at the seed point, performing a multi-scale-mean shift filtering in the perpendicular plane to estimate image gradient values, detecting a vessel boundary using a minimum-mean-cycle optimization that minimizes a ratio of a cost of a cycle to a length of a cycle, constructing a sub-voxel accurate vessel boundary about a point on the centerline, and refining the location of the centerline point from the sub-voxel accurate boundary, where the steps of constructing a sub-voxel accurate vessel boundary and refining the centerline point location are repeated until convergence.