Virtual Contrast for Coronary Vessels Based on Level Set Generated Subvoxel Accurate Centerlines

Bitter, Ingmar; Van Uitert, Robert; Wolf, Ivo; Tzatha, Efstathia; Gharib, Ahmed M; Summers, Ronald; Meinzer, Hans-Peter; Pettigrew, Roderic

doi:https://doi.org/10.1155/IJBI/2006/94025

International Journal of Biomedical Imaging

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Recent Advances in Mathematical Methods for the Analysis of Biomedical Images

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Volume 2006 | Article ID 094025 | https://doi.org/10.1155/IJBI/2006/94025

Virtual Contrast for Coronary Vessels Based on Level Set Generated Subvoxel Accurate Centerlines

Ingmar Bitter,¹Robert Van Uitert,¹Ivo Wolf,²Efstathia Tzatha,³Ahmed M Gharib,³Ronald Summers,¹Hans-Peter Meinzer,²and Roderic Pettigrew³

Received31 Jan 2006

Revised30 May 2006

Accepted06 Jun 2006

Published03 Sept 2006

Abstract

We present a tool for tracking coronary vessels in MRI scans of the human heart to aid in the screening of heart diseases. The vessels are identified through a single click inside each vessel present in a standard orthogonal view. The vessel identification results from a series of computational steps including eigenvalue analysis of the Hessian of the MRI image followed by a level set-based extraction of the vessel centerline. All identified vessels are highlighted using a virtual contrast agent and displayed simultaneously in a spherical curved reformation view. In cases of over segmentation, the vessel traces can be shortened by a click on each vessel end point. Intermediate analysis results of the vessel computation steps can be displayed as well. We successfully validated the tool on 40 MRI scans demonstrating accuracy and significant time savings over manual vessel tracing.

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Copyright

Copyright © 2006 Ingmar Bitter et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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