A system and method for artery-vein separation and vessel modeling are provided, the system including an adapter unit, a centerline locating unit in signal communication with the adapter unit, and a deformable modeling unit in signal communication with the centerline locating unit; and the method including receiving three-dimensional image data indicative of vessels, visualizing the received image data, selecting seed points on the vessels relative to the visualization, smoothing the image data with a non-linear filter responsive to curvature information of the data, initiating a deformable model for each selected seed point, modulating the propagation of each deformable model in accordance with at least one of local and global statistics, and growing an interconnected region for each model, where each model competes for classifying new points in its own region until convergence.