[Adaptive approximation of outer surface of blood vessels in magnetic resonance angiography]

In many cases, extraction and visualization of blood vessels in 3D magnetic resonance angiography (MRA) images are important in clinical diagnosis and surgery planning. Thus, this paper proposes a novel method to reconstruct high-accuracy outer surface of blood vessels from the 3D MRA. With the method, we first detect such local regions that contain blood structures from 3D image by using a boundary tracking technique. Second, in different local regions, different optimal isosurface patches are computed to adaptively represent outer surface of the contained blood vessels. Finally, all computed isosurface patches form a high-accuracy surface model for outer surface of the whole blood vessel structure are obtained. Error analysis and experimental results illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.