Chapter 6
Angiographic Image Analysis
Olena Tankyevych, Hugues Talbot, Nicolas Passat, Mariano Musacchio, and Michel Lagneau
6.1 Introduction
The important rise of medical imaging during the twentieth century, mainly induced by physics breakthroughs related to nuclear magnetic resonance and X-rays has led to the development of imaging modalities devoted to visualize vascular structures. The analysis of such angiographic images is of great interest for several clinical applications. Initially designed to generate 2D data, these imaging modalities progressively led to the acquisition of 3D images, enabling the visualization of vascular volumes.
However, such 3D data are generally huge, being composed of several millions of voxels, while the useful –vascular– information generally represents less than 5% of the whole volume. In addition to this sparseness, the frequent low signal- to-noise ratio and the potential presence of artifacts make the analysis of such images a challenging task. In order to assist radiologists and clinicians, it is therefore necessary to design software tools enabling them to extract as well as possible the relevant information embedded in 3D angiographic data.
One of the main ways to perform such a task is to develop segmentation methods, i.e., tools which (automatically or interactively) extract the vessels as 3D volumes from the angiographic images. A survey of such segmentation methods is proposed in Sect. 6.3. In particular, it sheds light on recent advances devoted to merge different image processing methodologies to improve the segmentation accuracy.
Another way to consider computer-aided analysis of 3D angiographic images is to provide human experts with a base of high-level anatomical knowledge which can possibly be involved in more specific analysis procedures such as vessel labelling.
O. Tankyevych ( )
Universit´ Paris-Est, Laboratoire d’Informatique Gaspard-Monge – UMR CNRS 8049, Paris, France
e-mail: tankyevo@esiee.fr
G. Dougherty (ed.), Medical Image Processing: Techniques and Applications, Biological |
115 |
and Medical Physics, Biomedical Engineering, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-9779-1 6, © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011