Automated 3D reconstruction of tree-like structures from two orthogonal views

The common use of orthogonal X-ray images for the diagnosis of vascular abnormalities provides a natural motivation for three dimensional reconstruction from two perpendicular views. Reconstruction from two projections is a problem with a non-unique solution. Ambiguity in the 3D reconstruction has previously been resolved by manually matching feature points between the two views. In this study, a priori knowledge of the object´s tree-like structure was incorporated into a rule-base in order to help automate the reconstruction process. The procedure for reconstruction of a tree-like structure from two orthogonal images contains three stages: extraction of the skeletal knowledge in each image, determination of the correspondence of tree segments between views by application of a heuristic rule-base, and algorithmic 3D reconstruction from the corresponding segment pairs