Automated nomenclature of upper abdominal arteries for displaying anatomical names on virtual laparoscopic images

Abstract

This paper presents a method for automated nomenclature of abdominal arteries that are extracted from 3D CT images based on the combination optimization approach for the displaying anatomical names on virtual laparoscopic images. It is important to understand the blood vessel network of a patient. Our proposed method recognizes the anatomical names of each arterial branch extracted from contrasted 3D images based on geometric features. We employ a combination optimization approach for treating the variations of branching patterns and overlay recognized anatomical names on virtual laparoscopic views for assisting the recognition of patient anatomy for surgeons. Experimental results using 89 cases of 3D CT images showed that the nomenclature accuracy for uncorrected blood vessel tree and corrected blood vessel tree were about 84.2% and 88.8% in average respectively and demonstrated anatomical name overlay on virtual laparoscopic images. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.