3D curve reconstruction by biplane snakes

Stent implantation for coronary disease treatment is a highly important minimally invasive technique that avoids surgery interventions. In order to assure the success of such an intervention, it is very important to determine the real length of the lesion as exactly as possible. Currently, lesion measures are performed directly from the angiography without considering the system projective parameters or, alternatively, from the 3D reconstruction obtained from a correspondence of points defined by the physicians. In this paper, we present a method for 3D vessel reconstruction from biplane images by means of deformable models. In particular, we study the known shortcoming of point-based 3D vessel reconstruction (no intersection of projective beams) and illustrate that by using snakes the reconstruction error is minimal. We validate out method by a computer-generated phantom, a real phantom and coronary vessels.