We propose a system to estimate blood flow velocity in angiographic image data for patient-specific blood flow simulations. Angiographies are acquired routinely for diagnosis and before treatment of vascular diseases. Projective blood flow is measured in digital subtraction X-ray angiography (2D-DSA) images by tracking contrast agent propagation. Spatial information is added by re-projecting 2D centerline pixels to the reconstructed 3D X-ray rotation angiography (3D-RA) data of the same subject. Ambiguities caused by occluding vessels from the virtual viewpoint of the acquired 2D-DSA image are resolved by a graph-based approach. The blood flow velocity can be used as boundary condition for exact blood flow simulations that can help physicians to understand hemodynamics of the vasculature. Our focus is to analyze cerebral angiographic data. We performed several experiments with phantom and patient data that proved the accuracy and the functionality of our method. We evaluated experimentally the projective flow estimation method and the re-projection method. We measured mean deviations to the ground truth between 11 % and 15.7 % for phantom data. We also showed the ability of our method to produce plausible results with patient-data.

Date Published: 1 March 2011
PDF: 9 pages
Proc. SPIE 7964, Medical Imaging 2011: Visualization, Image-Guided Procedures, and Modeling, 79640Y (1 March 2011); doi: 10.1117/12.878019

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 7964:
Medical Imaging 2011: Visualization, Image-Guided Procedures, and Modeling
Kenneth H. Wong; David R. Holmes III, Editor(s)