Combining Two Imaging Modalities for Neuroradiological Diagnosis: 3D Representation of Cerebral Blood Vessels

Today the integration of information from different imaging modalities in medicine such as Computer Tomography or Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is left to the physician and gets little support from computers. In the case of neuroradiological diagnosis, information about cerebral blood vessels is available from 3D volume data from Magnetic Resonance Angiography (MRA) and from 2D images generated by Digital Subtraction Angiography (DSA). The DSA images have a higher resolution than MRA data, and therefore neuroradiologists are highly interested in a 3D reconstruction of cerebral blood vessels from different DSA projections. On the other hand, MRA contains important functional information, the velocity of blood flow. This paper describes work in progress to make available to the physician the full 3D information from both imaging modalities including an approach to 3D reconstruction from DSA im ages which makes use of the MRA data. The 3D DSA reconstruction also opens the way to an integration of information from DSA with completely different types of information, for example information on anatomical structure or soft tissue from MRI. An integral part of this work is a pilot system for clinical validation.