A novel method is presented for detecting coronary arteries as well as other peripheral vessels of the heart. After finding the location of the myocardium through a segmentation method, such as a graph theoretic segmentation method, the method models the heart with a biaxial ellipsoid. For each point of the ellipsoid, a collection of intensities are computed that are normal to the surface. This collection is then filtered to detect the cardiovascular structures. Ultimately, vessel centerline points are detected using a vessel tracking method, and linked together to form a complete coronary artery tree.