Features detection and navigation on neurovascular trees

The 3D reconstruction of the cerebral vascular anatomy can greatly improve the diagnosis of vascular pathologies, such as embolisms and haemorrhages. This paper presents a new method for the automatic extraction of the blood vessels surface and the labelling of its features, specifically branching, aneurysms and stenoses. The method works with segmented magnetic resonance angiography images. It extracts a discrete medial axis transform from the stacked images and vectorizes it. During the vectorization process, the features are detected and labelled automatically. The final output is a labelled continuous medial axis transform representation of the vascular tree suitable for interactive visualizations and navigations, along with 3D geometrical and topological queries