Circle Hough Transform. Improvement by knowing edge direction
Consider circles of the form

$$(x - a)^2 + (y - b)^2 = r^2$$

The Circular Hough Transform with unknown radius and unknown gradient information has a parameter space $(a, b, r) \in H$. Given a single edge point we'd end up drawing a right cone increasing along the positive $r$ axis with its tip centered at $(x, y, 0)$.

Now to your question. When you know the gradient $\nabla I(x,y)$ of an edge point, $(x,y)$ from your image $I$, you have a vector originating from the center of the circle pointing outward. Since you have your edge point $(x,y)$ the center $(a, b)$ must lie somewhere along the lines $(x,y) \pm r \nabla I(x,y)$. There is only one variable in that statement, $r$.

Now the Circular Hough Transform becomes: for each edge point $(x,y)$, and for each plausible radius $r$, calculate $(a, b) = (x, y) \pm r \nabla I(x,y)$ and increment the accumulator array index $(a, b, r)$ by $1$. Then you go a do your usual vote counting to find the most likely parameters $(a, b, r)$.

For further details refer to D.H. Ballard, "Generalizing the Hough Transform to Detect Arbitrary Shapes" Pattern Recognition. Vol.13. 1981. Extends this concept to ellipses, general analytic curves, and the general transform.