GroBa: Growing balloons for calibre measurement on stenotic lumens

This papers describes GroBa, a new lumen calibre measurement technique based on growing balloons. GroBa presents the advantages of cross-sectional based methods, as it is able to cope with irregular, non-tubular vessel structures, such as stenosis or aneurysms, but at the same time it is able to obtain precise calibre measurements even when the estimated centrelines are not accurate. Experimental results using phantoms and real subtracted full-body magnetic resonance angiograms show the potential of this work. GroBa is integrated into a fully automatic system that segments the vasculature, obtains its centrelines, measures the lumen calibre at each detected artery, and presents the calibre information in false colours in the maximum intensity projection exploiting the HSV colour-space; all without any human intervention.