A complete simulation of x-ray angiography

This paper presents a complete simulation of x-ray angiography, which we have used as tool to assist our research work in three-dimensional reconstruction of vasculature from x-ray angiograms.)X-ray angiography is an image acquisition technique routinely used in clinical practice to obtain images of blood vessel networks, which operates as follows: x-ray opaque dye is injected into the blood flow and is driven through the vessel network by time varying pressure gradients. An x-ray device captures a sequence of images as the dye flows, yielding an animation in which each image shows part of the vasculature. Once an animation from a given point of view has been acquired, the x-ray device is moved to a new position and the whole process is repeated. The final result is a set of animations. The simulation is able to reproduce all the salient points of x-ray angiography. Given our motivation (reconstructing vascular skeletons) are generalised the simulation so that it can produce static images of complete vasculature, and pre-segmented images that represent key stages in our reconstruction algorithm.