Quantitative evaluation of virtual angiography for interventional X-ray acquisitions

Virtual angiography has been recently proposed as a method to indirectly validate the accuracy of computational fluid dynamic (CFD) simulations. In doing so, X-ray angiograms are created from CFD results and compared with the acquired data. In this paper, we apply the extended virtual angiography method which has been only tested on an imaged phantom to clinical data for the first time. To obtain realistic CFD simulations, the contrast agent injection (CA) curve and patient specific blood flow measured by transcranial colour coded Doppler ultrasound (TCCD) are used as boundary conditions. In a quantitative comparison, the spatial and temporal variation of CA concentration of both clinical and virtual angiograms showed good correspondence.