3D topological construction model of hepatic vascular tree in CT angiography

Abstract

The three-dimensional reconstruction of the liver images and to establish a virtual liver model is a way to compensate for the weaknesses of the two-dimensional images evaluation. The structure of vasculature describes the anatomic location and hierarchy of vessels, also embodies the blood supply. To get the graph representation of virtual hepatic vascular tree, we present a pipeline of algorithm steps. Firstly we extract the centerline of hepatic vasculature and execute the pruning operation, then we identify the branch-points and traverse the skeleton, and build the graph representation with a trie tree at the same time. These algorithm steps have been applied to the virtual liver surgery planning system and works well, and we can calculate some parameters such as vessel length, volume and diameter, and partition the liver interactively, and with these surgeons are able to analyze the vasculature quantitatively.