Exploiting Self-Similarity of Arterial Trees to Reduce the Complexity of Analysis

Document Type

Article

Language

eng

Publication Date

5-20-1999

Publisher

Society of Photo-optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE)

Source Publication

Proceedings of SPIE 3660: Medical Imaging 1999: Physiology and Function from Multidimensional Images, San Diego, CA, (February 20, 1999)

Original Item ID

DOI: 10.1117/12.349605

Abstract

Vascular structures such as the pulmonary arterial tree contain hundreds of thousands of vessel segments, making structural and functional analysis of an entire 3D image volume very difficult. Currently-available methods for segmentation and morphometry of 3D vascular tree images require user interaction making the task very tedious and sometimes impossible. Our aim is to exploit the self-similar nature of arterial trees to simplify morphometric analysis. The structure of pulmonary arterial trees exhibits self- similarity in the sense that the segment length and diameter data from different pathways are statistically indistinguishable for subtrees distal to a given segment diameter. We analyze 3D micro-CT images of mouse and rat pulmonary arterial trees by measuring the lengths and diameters of the vessel segments of the several longest arterial pathways and their immediate branches interactively. Since measurements made on the longest pathways are representative of the tree as a whole, and there are less than 30 branches off the main trunk, the morphometry of the complex tree can be characterized by less than 100 length and diameter measurements.

Comments

Exploiting Self-Similarity of Arterial Trees to Reduce the Complexity of Analysis. Proc. SPIE 3660, Medical Imaging 1999: Physiology and Function from Multidimensional Images, 351 (May 20, 1999). DOI.

Roger H. Johnson and Christopher A. Dawson were also affiliated with Medical College of Wisconsin, and Zablocki Veterans Affairs Medical Center at time of publication.

Robert C. Molthen was also affiliated with the Zablocki Veterans Affairs Medical Center.

Link to Full Text

Share

COinS