Dynamic reconstruction of 3D coronary arterial trees based on a sequence of biplane angiograms

To facilitate the evaluation of coronary artery and regional cardiac wall motion in three dimensions (3D), a method has been developed for 3D reconstruction of coronary arterial tree from two sequences of routine angiograms throughout the cardiac cycle acquired at arbitrary angles without using calibration objects. The proposed method consists of four major steps: (1) segmentation of vessel centerlines and feature extraction including bifurcation points, vessel diameters, vessel directional vectors, and vessel hierarchy in the two sequences of coronary angiograms, (2) determination of the optimal transformation in terms of a rotation matrix R and a translation vector (t) over right arrow for every pair of angiograms acquired at two different views based on the identified bifurcation points and vessel directional vectors, (3) calculation of 3D coronary arterial trees throughout the cardiac cycle based on the calculated transformations, identified vessel centerlines, and diameters, and (4) motion analysis and dynamic rendering of the reconstructed 3D coronary arterial trees throughout the cardiac cycle.