Robust and objective decomposition and mapping of bifurcating vessels

Area of Science:

• Computational biology
• Biomedical engineering
• Medical imaging

Background:

• Computational modeling of human arteries is crucial for understanding vascular disease.
• Realistic, non-invasively acquired geometries enable population-level studies.
• Comparing diverse vascular geometries requires novel, objective methods.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop an automatic technique for objective comparison of geometric and hemodynamic data in bifurcating vessels.
• To enable scalable analysis of large populations of patient-specific vascular models.

Main Methods:

• A centerline-based approach to decompose vessel surfaces into branches.
• Mapping each branch onto a template parametric plane for standardized comparison.
• Utilizing computational and differential geometry for parameter-free, robust analysis.

Main Results:

• The technique successfully compares similar geometries, yielding consistent results.
• Demonstrated objective comparison of geometric and hemodynamic distributions on vessel surfaces.
• The method is flexible for various bifurcation geometries and scalable to complex networks.

Conclusions:

• The presented automatic technique facilitates objective, large-scale comparison of vascular models.
• This method supports the investigation of anatomy-hemodynamics relationships across populations.
• It overcomes limitations of manual comparison and user-dependent parameters in computational vascular modeling.