A deformation tracking approach to 4D coronary artery tree reconstruction

This paper addresses reconstruction of a temporally deforming 3D coronary vessel tree, i.e., 4D reconstruction from a sequence of angiographic X-ray images acquired by a rotating C-arm. Our algorithm starts from a 3D coronary tree that was reconstructed from images of one cardiac phase. Driven by gradient vector flow (GVF) fields, the method then estimates deformation such that projections of deformed models align with X-ray images of corresponding cardiac phases. To allow robust tracking of the coronary tree, the deformation estimation is regularized by smoothness and cyclic deformation constraints. Extensive qualitative and quantitative tests on clinical data sets suggest that our algorithm reconstructs accurate 4D coronary trees and regularized estimation significantly improves robustness. Our experiments also suggest that a hierarchy of deformation models with increasing complexities are desirable when input data are noisy or when the quality of the 3D model is low.