Micro-CT Imaging The Structure Of Intrahepatic Blood Vessel And Bile Duct System

With high-density blood vessels and bile ducts,liver is the largest inner organ in mammals.The occurrence,development,diagnosis and treatment of liver diseases are related to the structure and location of intrahepatic vasculature,so the visualization and quantification of the basic morphology and 3D intrahepatic vasculature have great significance for the diagnosis and treatment.For the high resolution and short scanning time cost,CT imaging is one of the common method for exploring blood vessel morphology and structure.In order to exploit the optimal methods for the visualization of intrahepatic vasculature by CT imaging and the corresponding image processing,this work studied the intrahepatic vasculature in C57BL/6 albino mice combining with micro-CT imaging.After optimizing the imaging resolution and data processing,the in vivo and ex vivo liver vascular structure in both normal and liver metastasis mouse model could be obtained by CT imaging.The results we achieved are as follows:1)We explored the mapping method for liver blood with a suitable perfusion method for ex vivo liver and the usage of CT/fluorescence dual-modality nanoprobes offered complemental information of liver blood vessels by a combination of CT and optical imaging.2)We reconstructed the three-dimensional structure of the intrahepatic vessels by using voxel continuous 3D reconstruction of CT,and explored the process of 3D reconstruction.In this process,we introducing optimal threshold estimation,median filtering,and contrast enhancement,finally,an image processing technological process that can obtain information on the structure of high-quality intrahepatic vasculature was explored.3)Explore methods for CT imaging of intrahepatic vessels and bile ducts in living small animals.The whole and local structural information of the liver vessels of the living small animals were extracted,and the liver was partitioned on the two-dimensional plane by recognizing the position of the blood vessels in the liver.Furthermore,the differences of morphology,density,branch number,vascular smoothness and continuity were analyzed by comparing with the CT data between normal and tumor metastasized livers,which provided abundant information for the identification of tumor liver metastases.