An X-ray-based method for the determination of the contrast agent propagation in 3-D vessel structures

A method for the determination of the contrast-agent propagation in vessel trees is presented. A standard three-dimensional (3-D) rotational angiography procedure is performed to reconstruct the morphology of the contrast-filled vessel tree in a 3-D volume. An additional fluoroscopy projection series acquired with a fixed projection angle delivers the temporal information of the bolus propagating. The mapping of the propagation information from the two-dimensional projections to the 3-D image data set is the topic of this paper. A symbolic tree structure is built up that represents the vessel tree including bifurcations. Neighborhood relations between vessel pieces are given in three dimensions. This facilitates filtering procedures and plausibility controls of the resulting time dependent 3-D data set. The presented method proved to be accurate with phantom data and gives novel insight in the feeding structure of arterio-venous malformations and aneurysms.