FULLY-AUTOMATIC IMPROVEMENT OF THE GEOMETRY OF A VESSEL GRAPH

摘要

Volume representations of blood vessels acquired by 3D rotational angiography are very suitable for diagnosing a stenosis or an aneurysm. For optimal treatment, physicians need to know the shape parameters of the diseased vessel parts. Therefore, we developed a method for semi-automatic extraction of these parameters from a surface model of the vessel boundaries. To facilitate fully-automatic shape extraction along the vessels, we developed a method to generate a vessel graph. This vessel graph represents the topology faithfully. However, the nodes and the branches are not always located close to the center lines of the vessels. Nodes and branches outside the center region decrease the accuracy of the extracted shape parameters. In this paper we present a method to improve the geometry of a vessel graph.