Identification of vessel contours from three-dimensional magnetic resonance angiograms

Three-dimensional MR angiogram offers a means for visualizing the entire cerebral vessels from any orientation and for detecting the stenotic lesions. In this paper we proposed a new 3-D tracking method for reconstructing cerebral vessels from MR angiograms. Then, based on the image analysis and visualization results of the vessel trees, various important information can be computed. In vessel extraction, an urchin tracking technique is proposed to extract each segment of the vessel trees. The behaviors of the urchin including pinpricks growing, moving, and sub-urchin generation are designed and implement. Our scheme is also capable of handling the problem of the vessel bifurcation. In vessel display, semi-boundary technique was employed. The system performed in the vessel extraction takes roughly 15 seconds on a PC Pentium 166 for a 256 x 256 x 60 8-bits 3-D angiogram. Compared with conventional methods, we proposed a fast and stable method to obtain the 3-D vessel trees.