3D vessel extraction in the rat brain from ultrasensitive doppler images

Abstract

Ultrasensitive Doppler is a recent medical imaging technique enabling high sensitive acquisition of blood flows which can detect small vascular features without contrast agents. Applied to cerebral tomographic imaging of rodents, this method produces very fine vascular 3D maps of the brain at high spatial resolution of 100 μm. These vascular networks contain characteristic tubular structures that could be used as landmarks to localize the position of the ultrasonic probe and take advantage of the easy-to-use property of ultrasound devices. In this study, we propose a computational method that performs 3D extraction of vascular paths and estimates effective diameters of vessels, from ultrasensitive Doppler 3D reconstructed images of the rat brain. The method is based on the fast marching algorithm to extract curves minimizing length according to a relevant metric.