3D visualization of the human cerebral vasculature

Computer assisted 3D visualization of the human cerebro-vascular system can help to locate blood vessels during diagnosis and to approach them during treatment. Our aim is to reconstruct the human cerebro-vascular system from the partial information collected from a variety of medical imaging instruments and to generate a 3D graphical representation. This paper describes a tool developed for 3D visualization of cerebro-vascular structures. It also describes a symbolic approach to modeling vascular anatomy. The tool, called Ispline, is used to display the graphical information stored in a symbolic model of the vasculature. The vascular model was developed to assist image processing and image fusion. The model consists of a structural symbolic representation using frames and a geometrical representation of vessel shapes and vessel topology. Ispline has proved to be useful for visualizing both the synthetically constructed vessels of the symbolic model and the vessels extracted from a patient's MR angiograms.