Segmentation and reconstruction of vascular structures for 3D real-time simulation

We propose a technique to obtain accurate and smooth surfaces of patient specific vascular structures, using two steps: segmentation and reconstruction. The first step provides accurate and smooth centerlines of the vessels, together with cross section orientations and cross section fitting. The initial centerlines are obtained from a homotopic thinning of the vessels segmented using a level set method. In addition to circle fitting, an iterative scheme fitting ellipses to the cross sections and correcting the centerline positions is proposed, leading to a strong improvement of the cross section orientations and of the location of the centerlines. The second step consists of reconstructing the surface based on this data, by generating a set of topologically preserved quadrilateral patches of branching tubular structures. It improves Felkel's meshing method (Felkel et al., 2004) by: allowing a vessel to have multiple parents and children, reducing undersampling artifacts, and adapting the cross section distribution. Experiments, on phantom and real datasets, show that the proposed technique reaches a good balance in terms of smoothness, number of triangles, and distance error. This technique can be applied in interventional radi...Continue Reading