Augmented vessels for pre-operative preparation in endovascular treatments

Abstract

Three-dimensional rotational angiography is a very useful tool for accessing abnormal vascular structures related to a variety of vascular diseases. Quantitative study of the abnormalities could aid the radiologists to choose the appropriate apparatuses and endovascular treatments. Given a segmentation of an angiography, effective quantitation of the abnormalities is attainable if the abnormalities are detached from the normal vasculature. To achieve this, a novel method is presented, which allows the users to construct imaginary disease-free vessel lumens, namely augmented vessels, and demarcate the abnormalities on the fly interactively. The method has been tested on several synthetic images and clinical datasets. The experimental results have shown that it is capable of separating a variety of abnormalities, e.g., stenosis, saccular and fusiform aneurysms, from the normality. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2004.