Three-dimensional topological description of vessel structures based on tree model

According to the characteristics of magnetic resonance angiography (MRA), a system framework was proposed to represent the vessels in them with feature trees which keep their topology structure. After being preprocessed, the vasculature was segmented and maximal thinned. The vessel skeleton was recursively tracked to generate the feature tree and the tree was traversed consequently to pick up the branch points and end points. Moreover, forest was introduced to depict the vasculature in view of the complexity of real angiograms. The further fusion of digital subtraction angiograms and MRA can be implemented using this framework and then three-dimensional reconstruction of cerebral vasculature can be realized. Experiments to clinical angiographic data show that the present framework is feasible and effective.