• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.113-120
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• 2018

Angiography and CT angiography are used widely for the examination of vascular diseases, but the diagnosis of such diseases is made mostly by the subjective judgment of the inspector. This paper proposes a method for detecting the suspicious regions of stenosis and aneurysm in the inner surfaces of 3D blood vessel models reconstructed from medical images. Initially, the 3D curve-skeletons of the blood vessel models and the contours at the nodes of the curve-skeletons were generated. Next, the 3D curve-skeletons were divided into a set of branches and the areas of normal contours of nodes located in each branch were calculated. The nodes whose contours contain suspicious regions were detected by taking into account the average area, maximum and minimum areas, and the area difference between the adjacent normal contours. The diagnosis of stenosis and aneurysm can be supported by properly visualizing the suspicious regions detected. The suspicious regions of the disease were identified by implementing and testing it using several data sets of human blood vessels, highlighting the usefulness of the proposed method.

• Korean Journal of Computational Design and Engineering
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• v.22 no.1
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• pp.89-99
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• 2017

In order to make a virtual endoscopy system effective for exploring the interior of the 3D model of a human organ, it is necessary to generate an accurate navigation path located inside the 3D model and to obtain consistent camera position and pose estimation along the path. In this paper, we propose an approach to virtual navigation of blood vessels, which makes proper use of orthogonal contours and skeleton curves. The approach generates the orthogonal contours and the skeleton curves from the 3D mesh model and its voxel model, all of which represent the blood vessels. For a navigation zone specified by two nodes on the skeleton curves, it computes the shortest path between the two nodes, estimates the positions and poses of a virtual camera at the nodes in the navigation zone, and interpolates the positions and poses to make the camera move smoothly along the path. In addition to keyboard and mouse input, intuitive hand gestures determined by the Leap Motion SDK are used as user interface for virtual navigation of the blood vessels. The proposed approach provides easy and accurate means for the user to examine the interior of 3D blood vessels without any collisions between the camera and their surface. With a simple user study, we present illustrative examples of applying the approach to 3D mesh models of various blood vessels in order to show its quality and usefulness.