A Tool for the Semiautomatic Acquisition of the Morphological Data of Blood Vessel Networks

Abstract

The simulation of the dynamics of the blood flow in the venous system of the lower limb is an important tool for supporting clinical research and for suggesting possible treatments for many diseases, e.g. for enhancing the surgical treatment of chronic venous insufficiency (CVI). Nevertheless the accuracy of the simulation of the blood flow is strictly related to the morphological data characterizing the investigated venous system. Although some of these data can be extracted from the observation of the real blood flow of a patient, e.g. through the acquisition of a set of images, the extraction of such values is often performed in a manual way, so the need for the automatic induction of parameters arises. The paper presents a software module that allows the semiautomatic acquisition of the morphological data of the venous system of a patient. The tool, developed as a plugin of the ImageJ imaging platform, receives in input a DICOM file containing the computerized tomography (CT) of the vessels network of the lower limb, and produces in a semi-automatic way a weighted graph of the network. This model can be used as the input for a subsequent simulation of the system.