An interactive 3D visualization and manipulation tool foreffective assessment of angiogenesis and arteriogenesis usingcomputed tomographic angiography

• This paper presents IVM, an Interactive Vessel Manipulation tool that can help make effective and efficient assessmentof angiogenesis and arteriogenesis in computed tomographic angiography (CTA) studies. IVM consistsof three fundamental components: (1) a visualization component, (2) a tracing component, and (3) a measurementcomponent. Given a user-specified threshold, IVM can create a 3D surface visualization based on it. Sincevessels are thin and tubular structures, using standard isosurface extraction techniques usually cannot yieldsatisfactory reconstructions. Instead, IVM directly renders the surface of a derived binary 3D image. The imagevolumes collected in CTA studies often have a relatively high resolution. Thus, compared with more complicatedvessel extraction and visualization techniques, rendering the binary image surface has the advantages of beingeffective, simple and fast. IVM employs a semi-automatic approach to determine the threshold: a user can adjustthe threshold by checking the corresponding 3D surface reconstruction and make the choice. Typical tracingsoftware often defines ROIs on 3D image volumes using three orthogonal views. The tracing component in IVMtakes one step further: it can perform tracing not only on image slices but also in a 3D view. We observe thatdirectly operating on a 3D view can help a tracer identify ROIs more easily. After setting a threshold and tracingan ROI, a user can use IVM’s measurement component to estimate the volume and other parameters of vesselsin the ROI. The effectiveness of the IVM tool is demonstrated on rat vessel/bone images collected in a previousCTA study.

Nyckelord

Computed tomographic angiography

3D surface visualization

region of interest

vessel extraction

MEDICINE

MEDICIN

NATURAL SCIENCES

NATURVETENSKAP

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