| The blockage in the coronary vessels due to fatty deposits is the major cause for the heart attack and hence over 500,000 deaths in United States each year. The interventional procedures, which are used to facilitate the blood flow in the diseased region, require accurate sizes and the lengths of such vessel-regions. Angioplasty balloons and stents, which are used to open up such constricted paths, are chosen based on these sizes and lengths. Thus, vessel sizes, magnification and orientation play an important role in the overall procedure. A technique to track the centerline of the vessels and to determine the vessel sizes is developed. To facilitate the analysis of the image data, a method of the background correction is proposed, giving a uniform background for the entire image. Techniques for determination of vessel sizes are combined to overcome the deficiencies in each. Furthermore, accurate measurements of the vessel structures in 3D and determination of the orientation of these vasculatures are important in such therapeutic interventions. In most of the previously developed techniques, this reconstruction requires indicating the corresponding points on the two views of the vessel images and these points are used to refine the imaging geometry. A technique is implemented on the clinical images, which minimizes the dependence on the indication of the corresponding points by using correspondences between the image data in two views of the vessel. Modifications of this technique are investigated to improve the performance over a broad range of image data. The result of the work is more reliable vessel sizing and techniques which eliminate the reliance on corresponding points in vascular analysis. |
