title: Forest representation of vessels in cone-beam computed tomographic angiography.
abstract: Cone-beam computed tomographic angiography (CBCTA) provides a fast three-dimensional (3D) vascular imaging modality, aiming at digitally representing the spatial vascular structure in an angiographic volume. Due to the finite coverage of cone-beam scan, as well as the volume cropping in volumetric image processing, an angiographic volume may fail to contain a whole vascular tree, but rather consist of a multitude of vessel segments or subtrees. As such, it is convenient to represent multitudinal components by a forest. The vessel tracking issue then becomes component characterization/identification in the forest. The forest representation brings several conveniences for vessel tracking: (1) to sort and count the vessels in an angiographic volume, for example, according to spatial occupancy and skeleton pathlength; (2) to single out a vessel and perform in situ 3D measurement and 3D visualization in the support space; (3) to delineate individual vessels from the original angiographic volume; and (4) to cull the forest by getting rid of non-vessels and small vessels. A 3D skeletonization is used to generate component skeletons. For tree construction from skeletons, we suggest a pathlength-based procedure, which lifts the restrictions of unit-width skeleton and root determination. We experimentally demonstrate the forest representation of a dog's carotid arteries in a CBCTA system. In principle, the forest representation is useful for managing vessels in both 2D angiographic images and 3D angiographic volumes.
authors.affiliation: Department of Radiology, University of Rochester, Box 648, 601 Elmwood Avenue, Rochester, NY 14642, USA. zikuan-chen@urmc.rochester.edu
authors.forename: Zikuan
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Chen
authors.forename: Ruola
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Ning
mesh_terms: D000792:Angiography / Q000379:methods*; D000818:Animals; D002339:Carotid Arteries / Q000033:anatomy & histology*; D004285:Dogs; D014057:Tomography, X-Ray Computed / Q000379:methods*; D014481:United States