[Usefulness of the classification technique of cerebral artery for 2D/3D registration.]

Several papers have proposed 2D/3D registration methods of the cerebral artery using magnetic resonance angiography (MRA) and digital subtraction angiography (DSA). Since differences between vessels in a DSA image and MRA volume data cause registration failure, we previously proposed a method to extract vessels from MRA volume data using a technique based on classification of the cerebral artery. In this paper, we evaluated the usefulness of this classification technique by evaluating the reliability of this 2D/3D registration method. This classification method divides the cerebral artery in MRA volume data into 12 segments. According to the results of the classification, structures corresponding to vessels on a DSA image can then be extracted. We applied the 2D/ 3D registration with /without classification to 16 pairs of MRA volume data and DSA images obtained from six patients. The registration results were scored into four levels (Excellent, Good, Fair and Poor). The rates of successful registration (> fair) were 37.5% for registration without classification and 81.3% for that with classification. These findings suggested that there was a low percentage of incorrectly extracted voxels and we could facilitate reliable registration. Thus, the classification technique was shown to be useful for feature-based 2D/ 3D registration.