Level set based surface capturing in 3D medical images

Abstract

Brain aneurysm rupture has been reported to be directly related to the size of aneurysms. The current method used to determine aneurysm size is to manually measure the width of the neck and height of the dome on a computer screen. Because aneurysms usually have complicated shapes, using the size of the aneurysm neck and dome may not be accurate and may overlook important geometrical information. In this paper we present a level set based illusory surface algorithm to capture the aneurysms from the vascular tree. Since the aneurysms are described by level set functions, not only the volume but also the curvature of aneurysms can be computed for medical studies. Experiments and comparisons with models used for capturing illusory contours in 2D images are performed. This includes applications to clinical image data demonstrating the procedure of accurately capturing a middle cerebral artery aneurysm. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.