ECE 533: Project Proposal
Vessel Branch Segmentation of Phase Contrast Vastly undersampled Projection Magnetic Resonance Imaging
Kevin Johnson
November 21, 2006
Purpose
The purpose of this project will be to develop techniques to segment vascular and venous branches of state of the art phase contrast (PC) MRI exams. Specifically, 3D images obtained from a radial undersampling technique deemed Vastly undersampled Isotropic PRojection (VIPR) will be investigated. PC VIPR has the ability to provide a set of four corresponding 3D images showing the proton density and three orthogonal velocity components. This project will focus on the segmentation of these image sets in order to separate various branches in the neuro-vasculature.
Methods
The focus of the project will be two fold. The first objective is to provide high quality region based segmentation of the data. This will be done using methods which combine previous efforts by investigators which utilize local phase coherence and more traditional methods including adaptive 3D local thresholding. Appropriate weighting between the methods will be explored. The second aim of this project will be to develop methods to determine region connectivity, remove erroneous regions, and isolate each vasculature branch. This will be performed using basic connectivity and a 3D implementation of the watershed technique to isolate center line of vessels. This data will then be eroded by an appropriate amount and processed to show maximum intensity projections of each branch alone.
References
[1] Chung A.C. , Noble J.A., Summers P. Vascular Segmentation of Phase Contrast Magnetic Resonance Angiograms Based on Statistical Mixture Modeling and Local Phase Coherence. IEEE Trans on Medical Imaging. 23(12):1490-1507
[2]Gu T, Korosec FR, Block WF, Fain SB, Turk Q, Lum D, Zhou Y, Grist TM, Haughton V, Mistretta CA. PC VIPR: a high-speed 3D phase-contrast method for flow quantification and high-resolution angiography. AJNR Am J Neuroradiol. 2005 Apr;26(4):743-9.