A new approach to measuring tortuosity
Amanda Wert, Sherry E. Scott · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2012
The detection and measurement of the tortuosity - i.e. the bending and winding - of vessels has been shown to be potentially useful in the assessment of cancer progression and treatment response. Although several metrics for tortuosity are used, no single one measure is able to capture all types of tortuosity. This report presents a new multiscale technique for measuring vessel tortuosity. The approach is based on a method - called the ergodicity defect - which gives a scale-dependent measure of deviation from ergodicity. Ergodicity is a concept that captures the manner in which trajectories or signals sample the space; thus, ergodicity and vessel tortuosity both involve the notion of how a signal samples space. Here we begin to explore this connection. We first apply the ergodicity defect tortuosity measure to both 2D and 3D synthetic data in order to demonstrate the response of the method to three types of tortuosity observed in clinical patterns. We then implement the technique on segmented vessels extracted from brain tumor MRA images. Results indicate that the method can be effectively used to detect and measure several types of vessel tortuosity.