OpenCCO: An Implementation of Constrained Constructive Optimization for Generating 2D and 3D Vascular Trees

In this article, we focus on the algorithm called CCO (Constrained Constructive Optimization), initially proposed by Schreiner and Buxbaum [Computer-Optimization of Vascular Trees, IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, 40, 1993] and further extended by Karch et al. [A Three-Dimensional Model for Arterial Tree Representation, Generated by Constrained Constructive Optimization, Computers in Biology and Medicine, 29, 1999]. This algorithm can be considered as one of the gold standards for vascular tree structure generation. Modeling and/or simulating the morphology of vascular networks is a challenging but crucial task that can have a strong impact on different applications such as fluid simulation or learning processes related to image segmentation. Various implementations of CCO were proposed over the last years. However, to the best of our knowledge, there does not exist any open-source version that faithfully follows the native CCO algorithm. Our purpose is to propose such an implementation both in 2D and 3D.