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 radiology simulations, virtual endoscopy and in reconstruction of smooth and accurate three-dimensional models for use in simulation. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.