2010 Winter Project Week The Vascular Modeling Toolkit in 3D Slicer

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  Projects List

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  A coronary artery segmented using VMTK in 3D Slicer.

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  Close-up showing the corresponding Voronoi diagram and centerline.

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  An over-layed label map showing the segmentation in 2D.

Key Investigators

• Daniel Haehn (Student of Medical Informatics, University of Heidelberg)
• Steve Pieper, Isomics, Inc.

Objective

The Vascular Modeling Toolkit (VMTK) is a collection of libraries and tools for 3D reconstruction, geometric analysis, mesh generation and surface data analysis for image-based modeling of blood vessels. It should be very interesting to offer such techniques in 3D Slicer.

The official project page: http://www.vmtk.org/Main/VmtkIn3DSlicer

Approach, Plan

To provide VMTK functionality in 3D Slicer the vtkVmtk library has to be available as an add-on. With the connection of VMTK and 3D Slicer processing pipelines between VMTK code and other algorithms can be established.

Plan for project week: Investigate why the VMTK library module (VmtkSlicerModule) does not build on Win32 and clean-up of existing VMTK in 3D Slicer code.

Progress

The VMTK library and modules providing selected functionality are available as 3D Slicer extensions. This enables a flexible and convenient way for distribution and installation.

The following extensions are available:

• VmtkSlicerModule - a gui-less module providing the latest VMTK library (base installation)
• VMTKLevelSetSegmentation - providing the VMTK level-set segmentation process including different algorithms for initialization and evolution
• VMTKEasyLevelSetSegmentation - an easier interface to level-set segmentation with selected algorithms
• VMTKVesselEnhancement - Vesselness filtering to enhance tubular structures
• VMTKCenterlines - Centerline computation of polydata models

The modules have been successfully applied to segmentation problems (e.g. Coronary Artery Centerline Extraction - see Tutorial).

References

• Antiga L, Piccinelli M, Botti L, Ene­Iordache B, Remuzzi A, Steinmann DA. (2008) An image­based modeling framework for patient­specific computational hemodynamics. Med Biol Eng Comput 46(11):1097­1112
• Antiga L, Steinman DA (2008) The Vascular Modeling Toolkit. http://www.vmtk.org/
• Hähn D (2009) Integration of The Vascular Modeling Toolkit in 3D Slicer. Student Research Project, SPL.
• Piccinelli M, Veneziani A, Steinman DA, Remuzzi A, Antiga L (2009) A framework for geometric analysis of vascular structures: applications to cerebral aneurysms. IEEE Trans Med Imaging. In press.