Study on liver blood vessel movement during breathing cycle

Liver blood vessel movement information is important for improving the accuracy of minimally invasive therapies such as high intensity focused ultrasound and radio frequency ablation. In this paper, we present a rigid registration of centerlines obtained from multiscale vessel enhanced liver images to understand the movement of liver during breathing cycle. The method uses modified vesselness filter for finding vessel-enhanced images. The vesselness images are used for finding the centerlines of the vessels and then used for registering rigidly using the iterative closest point algorithm. Our study has shown on volunteer magnetic resonance images, the liver blood vessels move an average of approximately 3cms during the breathing cycle. Our method can potentially be used to correct for respiratory motion during image-guided liver procedures.