by Armin Kanitsar, Dominik Fleischmann, Rainer Wegenkittl, Petr Felkel and Meister Eduard Gröller

Abstract

Visualization of tubular structures such as blood vessels is an important topic in medical imaging. One way to display tubular structures for diagnostic purposes is to generate longitudinal cross-sections in order to show their lumen, wall, and surrounding tissue in a curved plane. This process is called Curved Planar Reformation (CPR). We present three different methods to generate CPR images. A tube-phantom was scanned with Computed Tomography (CT) to illustrate the properties of the different CPR methods. Furthermore we introduce enhancements to these methods: thick-CPR, rotating-CPR and multi-path-CPR.

Keywords: computed tomography angiography, vessel analysis, curved planar reformation

Download full paper

Armin Kanitsar, Dominik Fleischmann, Rainer Wegenkittl, Petr Felkel, Meister Eduard Gröller, "CPR - Curved Planar Reformation", in Proceedings of IEEE Visualization 2002, AKanitsar_CPR.pdf (2.104KB).

Figures in the paper

Figure 1:

Principle of the CPR visualization.
Figure 2:

Different CPR generation methods: a) Projected CPR, b) Stretched CPR, c) Straightened CPR.
Figure 3:

Iso-surface extraction of the ´Tubes Phantom´ at -224 HU.
Figure 4:

Top to bottom: MIP, Projected CPR, Stretched CPR, Straightened CPR. Left to right: Major central-axis direction parallel to z-axis, parallel to y-axis, parallel to x-axis, in arbitrary direction.
Figure 5:

Artificial stenosis introduced by imprecise central axis computation.
Figure 6:

Left side: A stretched CPR of the whole data set. Middle and right side: Enlargement of the upper and lower sector. Top row to bottom row: Averaging, MIP and MinIP resampling of 0 mm, 5 mm and 10 mm.
Figure 7:

Left to Right: MinIP of 5 mm thick slab, MIP of 0 mm thick slab, MIP of 5 mm thick slab.
Figure 8:

Rotating Stretched CPR: 0°, 30°, 60°, 90°, 120°, 150°, 180°.
Figure 9:

MIP compositing of multiple projected CPRs at 120° viewing direction.
Figure 10:

Generation of multiple CPRs.
Figure 11:

Left to right: Overview of a multiple projected CPR at 0°. Enlargement of the upper part of multiple projected CPRs at 30°, 60°, 90°, 120°, 150°, 180°.
Figure 12:

Left to right: Overview of a multiple stretched CPR at 0°. Enlargement of the upper part of multiple projected CPRs at 30°, 60°, 90°, 120°, 150°, 180°.

Additional Material



Some presentations held on this topic:
Talk presented at IEEE Visualization 2002 (Boston, MA)

Talk comprising technical aspects of the presented methods.
presentation slides (ppt) (~7.984KB)     slides and movies (.zip) (~157.381KB)
General overview slides for the Multi-Path CPR method

Talk comprising medical aspects of the presented methods.
presentation slides (ppt) (~4.092KB)     slides and movies (.zip) (~10.803KB)


A short collection of animations related to this work:
Animation 1:

Iso-surface extraction of the 'Tubes Phantom' at -224 HU (.avi)
low resolution (mpg) (~5.227KB)     high resolution (~15.424KB)
Animation 2:

A projected CPR of a realworld dataset (.avi)
low resolution (mpg) (~5.227KB)     high resolution (~17.155KB)
Animation 3:

A multiple projected CPR of a realworld dataset (.avi)
low resolution (mpg) (~5.227KB)     high resolution (~20.803KB)
Animation 4:

A stretched CPR of a realworld dataset (.avi)
low resolution (mpg) (~5.227KB)     high resolution (~20.894KB)
Animation 5:

A multiple stretched CPR of a realworld dataset (.avi)
low resolution (mpg) (~5.127KB)     high resolution (~20.894KB)
Animation 6:

A straightened CPR of a realworld dataset (.avi)
low resolution (mpg) (~5.227KB)     high resolution (~17.155KB)

BibTeX Entry

@INPROCEEDINGS{ak02cpr,
  author =       {Armin Kanitsar and Dominik Fleischmann and Rainer 
                  Wegenkittl and Petr Felkel and Meister Eduard Gr\"oller},
  title =        {{CPR} - {C}urved {P}lanar {R}eformation},
  booktitle =    {{IEEE} {V}isualization 2002},
  year =         {2002},
  month =        oct,
  pages =        {37--44},
  keywords =     {computed tomography angiography, vessel analysis, 
                  curved planar reformation},
  institution =  {Institute of Computer Graphics and Algorithms, 
                  Vienna University of Technology},
  url =          {http://www.cg.tuwien.ac.at/research/vis/adapt/},
  note =         {human contact: {kanitsar@cg.tuwien.ac.at}},
}