Interaction Techniques for the Exploration of Hepatic Vessel Structure

Hepatic vessel system is one of the most complex vessel systems in human body. For liver surgical planning, morphology and topology analysis of the hepatic vessel system is of our major interest. In this article, we present a new method to analyze the liver vessel system. Starting from the raw CT data set, vessel system is segmented. Based on that, then skeleton line of the vessel system is extracted and a symbolic vessel tree is constructed. The interactive analysis is achieved by combination of the abstract vessel tree information and the vessel surface model. The experimental results illustrate that the algorithm is effective, easy to implement, and addresses fully interaction facilities. The whole processing involves no human interventions, except the preprocessing of CT images