Lumen segmentation and visualization of abdominal aorta using geodesic active contours for intravascular surgical simulation

Percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty (PTCA) has been proved to be a standard solution to most cardiovascular diseases (CVDs). The surgical simulator provides the trainees a new vehicle to learn this skill much more conveniently and effectively. The blood vessel model is at the core of the virtual environment. In this paper, a robust and semi-automatic approach to segment the abdominal aorta from the computed tomography angiography (CTA) is developed. The proposed approach employs the geodesic active contours method as the main component. The edge potential map is generated by applying nonlinear mapping function. The initial contours are evolved by applyging the fast marching method. The surface information representing the vessel is extracted by the marching cubes method. This approach has been proved successful for the construction of 3-D surface model of the aorta based on the CTA series.