An interactive 3D visualization and manipulation tool for effective assessment of angiogenesis and arteriogenesis using computed tomographic angiography

摘要

This paper presents IVM, an Interactive Vessel Manipulation tool that can help make effective and efficient assessment of angiogenesis and arteriogenesis in computed tomographic angiography (CTA) studies. IVM consists of three fundamental components: (1) a visualization component, (2) a tracing component, and (3) a measurement component. Given a user-specified threshold, IVM can create a 3D surface visualization based on it Since vessels are thin and tubular structures, using standard isosurface extraction techniques usually cannot yield satisfactory reconstructions. Instead, IVM directly renders the surface of a derived binary 3D image. The image volumes collected in CTA studies often have a relatively high resolution. Thus, compared with more complicated vessel extraction and visualization techniques, rendering the binary image surface has the advantages of being effective, simple and fast. IVM employs a semi-automatic approach to determine the threshold: a user can adjust the threshold by checking the corresponding 3D surface reconstruction and make the choice. Typical tracing software often defines ROIs on 3D image volumes using three orthogonal views. The tracing component in IVM takes one step further: it can perform tracing not only on image slices but also in a 3D view. We observe that directly operating on a 3D view can help a tracer identify ROIs more easily. After setting a threshold and tracing an ROI, a user can use IVM's measurement component to estimate the volume and other parameters of vessels in the ROI. The effectiveness of the IVM tool is demonstrated on rat vessel/bone images collected in a previous CTA study.