IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics

Interactive Virtual Probing of 4D MRI Blood-Flow

R.F.P. van Pelt, Javier Olivan Bescos, Marcel Breeuwer, R.E. Clough, Meister Eduard Groeller, B.M. ter Haar Romeny, and Anna Vilanova

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Better understanding of hemodynamics conceivably leads to improved diagnosis and prognosis of cardiovascular diseases. Therefore, an elaborate analysis of the blood-flow in heart and thoracic arteries is essential. Contemporary MRI techniques enable acquisition of quantitative time-resolved flow information, resulting in 4D velocity fields that capture the blood-flow behavior. Visual exploration of these fields provides comprehensive insight into the unsteady blood-flow behavior, and precedes a quantitative analysis of additional blood-flow parameters. The complete inspection requires accurate segmentation of anatomical structures, encompassing a time-consuming and hard-to-automate process, especially for malformed morphologies. We present a way to avoid the laborious segmentation process in case of qualitative inspection, by introducing an interactive virtual probe. This probe is positioned semi-automatically within the blood-flow field, and serves as a navigational object for visual exploration. The difficult task of determining position and orientation along the view-direction is automated by a fitting approach, aligning the probe with the orientations of the velocity field. The aligned probe provides an interactive seeding basis for various flow visualization approaches. We demonstrate illustration-inspired particles, integral lines and integral surfaces, conveying distinct characteristics of the unsteady blood-flow. Lastly, we present the results of an evaluation with domain experts, valuing the practical use of our probe and flow visualization techniques.

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@article{bib:van pelt:2011,
    author       = { van Pelt, R.F.P. and Bescos, Javier Olivan and Breeuwer, Marcel and Clough, R.E. and Groeller, Meister Eduard and ter Haar Romeny, B.M. and Vilanova, Anna },    
    title        = { Interactive Virtual Probing of 4D MRI Blood-Flow },
    journal      = { IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics },
    volume       = { 17 },
    year         = { 2011 },
    pages        = { 2153--2162 },
    doi          = { 10.1109/TVCG.2011.215 },
    dblp         = { journals/tvcg/PeltBBCGRV11 },
    url          = { https://publications.graphics.tudelft.nl/papers/499 },
}