Reconstruction of Blood Vessels from Neck CT Datasets using Stable 3D Mass-Spring Models

Abstract

Preoperative neck dissection planning benefits from a smooth, organic visualization of the main blood vessels of the neck, in particular the carotid artery and jugular vein. While most reconstruction techniques for vasculature are designed for segmenting the complete vessel tree, our goal is to isolate these specific blood vessels of the neck from the CT dataset, and to exclude irrelevant vasculature from the visualization. Pure threshold- and iso value-based reconstruction techniques do not allow such a selective segmentation and often lead to undersegmentation at the lower parts of the blood vessels, due to inhomogeneous contrast agent diffusion. In order to avoid staircase artifacts in the visualizations of the reconstructed vascular structures, a subvoxel accuracy of the reconstruction technique is also required. We present a model-based reconstruction technique to isolate blood vessels from neck CT datasets using Stable 3D Mass-Spring Models. The results can be visualized directly without staircase artifacts. The interaction needed for the reconstruction is reduced substantially to only a few clicks along the blood vessels. The presented method was evaluated with 30 blood vessels from 14 CT datasets of the neck and could be shown to be accurate, while leading to smooth visualizations of the neck blood vessels.