Detecting a pulmonary embolism (PE) in an image dataset of a blood vessel involves obtaining a volume of interest (VOI) in the blood vessel, generating a plurality of PE candidates within the VOI, generating a set of voxels for each PE candidate, estimating for each PE candidate an orientation of the blood vessel that contains the PE candidate, given the set of voxels for the PE candidate, and generating a visualization of the blood vessel that contains the PE candidate using the estimated orientation of the blood vessel that contains the PE candidate.