Identification of vessel contours from three-dimensional magnetic resonance angiograms
Yung‐Nien Sun, Shu‐Chien Huang, Fwn-Jeng Chen, Chin‐Yin Yu, Tong‐Yee Lee · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1999
3D MR angiogram offers a means for visualizing the entire cerebral vessels from any orientation and for detecting the stenotic lesions. In this paper we proposed a new 3D tracking method for reconstructing cerebral vessels from MR angiograms. Then, based on the image analysis and visualization results of the vessel trees, various important information can be computed. In vessel extraction, an urchin tracking technique is proposed to extract each segment of the vessel trees. The behaviors of the urchin including pinpricks growing, moving, and sub-urchin generation are designed and implement. Our scheme is also capable of handling the problem of the vessel bifurcation. In vessel display, semi-boundary technique was employed. The system performed in the vessel extraction takes roughly 15 seconds on a PC Pentium 166 for a 256 X 256 X 60 8-bits 3D angiogram. Compared with conventional methods, we proposed a fast and stable method to obtain the 3D vessel trees.