3D reconstruction of large tubular geometries from CT data

Abstract

In several medical applications it is necessary to have a good reconstruction of approximately tubular structures - mainly blood vessels but also intestine or bones - providing a description of both the internal lumen (usually a triangulated surface) and its networked structure (skeleton). This description should be such that it allows lengths and diameters estimation. Several methods have been proposed for these tasks, each one with advantages and drawbacks and, typically, specialized to a particular application. We focused our attention on methods making as few assumptions as possible on the structure to be determined in order to capture also anomalous features like bulges and bifurcations. We looked for a method able to obtain surfaces that are smooth, with a limited number of triangles but accurate and skeletons that are continuously connected and centered. The results of our work is the use of customized deformable surface and multi-scale regularized voxel coding centerlines to obtain geometries and skeletons with the desired properties. The algorithms are being tested for real clinical analysis and results are promising. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.