Summer2009:The Vascular Modeling Toolkit in 3D Slicer

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  Project Week Main Page

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  Example segmentation of cerebral vessels and a tumor using VMTK in 3D Slicer

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  Example segmentation of vessels in an arm bearing a vascular access for hemodialysis

Key Investigators

• Daniel Haehn (Student of Medical Informatics, University of Heidelberg)

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.

Approach, Plan

To provide VMTK tools 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.

The plan is to clean-up existing VMTK in 3D Slicer code, provide additional VMTK functionality in 3D Slicer as well as to optimize the work-flow between the existing VMTK modules. This includes more level set evolution methods and variable calculation of feature images during level set segmentation.

Progress

The library of VMTK was made available in 3D Slicer using a GUI-less loadable module approach in order to provide a flexible way of distributing and including it. Therefore all VMTK functions are available to 3D Slicer developers.

Python scripted modules offering VMTK level set segmentation methods and VMTK vessel enhancement filters within 3D Slicer were created. These include the following algorithms:

• Colliding Fronts and Fast Marching Upwind Gradient initialization
• Geodesic Active Contour and Curves evolution
• FrangiVesselness, SatoVesselness and VesselEnhancingDiffusion filters

The created modules are available at the VMTK in 3D Slicer NITRC page: http://www.nitrc.org/projects/slicervmtklvlst/

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/
• 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.