Skeleton Marching: A High-performance Parallel Vascular Geometry Reconstruction Technique

Fast high-precision patient-specific vascular geometric reconstruction is an essential task for computer aided minimally invasive vascular disease diagnosis and surgery. To effectively represent the highly complicated geometric structure of a vascular tree, implicit modelling is preferred because of its easy-blending nature on combining implicitly modelled geometric shapes. Based on implicit modelling, this paper proposes a parallel technique, called skeleton marching, for fast vascular geometric reconstruction. Long and complex blood vessels are firstly divided into short and simple vessel segments along the vascular skeleton. Localised segmentation method is then used to extract point clouds from these blood vessel segments. These small point clouds are then fitted with a set of implicit surfaces in a parallel manner. A high-precision geometric vascular tree is then reconstructed by blending together these small implicit surfaces using the shape-preserving blending operations. Experimental results show the time required for reconstructing a vascular system can be greatly reduced by the proposed parallel technique.