A new approach to the visualization of intracranial arteriovenous malformation with principal component analysis

In stereotactic radiosurgery for intracranial arteriovenous malformations (AVMs), the authors have to decide on an irradiation field with an accurate three-dimensional image of the brain blood vessels. Now this irradiation field is decided on with reference to angiograms or dynamic X-ray CT images of the brain. Generally intracranial AVMs are complicated in structure, so it Is very difficult to pinpoint the diseased region. The purpose of this study is to identify the area accurately. The proposed method uses a sequence of dynamic X-ray CT images with contrast and opaque media. Then these images are analyzed by means of a principal component analysis method. Results obtained by this method showed that the proposed method could identify an AVM area. The authors also reconstructed three dimensional fusion images with two dimensional factor images