Estimating cerebral blood flow from a rotational angiographic system

A method for the measurement of cerebral blood flow from a rotational angiographic system is presented. The input data consists of a rotational sequence of 2D angiographic images and a 3D reconstructed volume. In a first method, a 2D flow field is estimated from consecutive frames using a method which combines mass continuity with an optic flow method. Motion due to the rotation of the C-arm is corrected using the 3D model. We then refine the flow measurement method to incorporate knowledge of the vessel orientation. Tests on synthetic data produced results which were qualitatively correct in terms of field orientation and radial flow distribution. Tests on phantom data showed that including the motion correction step made a small improvement qualitatively, and using orientation information in addition to this showed a much larger improvement.