Functional reconstruction of the coronary tree from biplane angiographic sequences

The authors designed a method to reconstruct and visualize the coronary tree from one biplane angiogram by modeling a 3-D Bezier curve to the 3-D structure of the coronary arteries. The start and end points of the single Bezier curves in one image have corresponding points in the other image. To facilitate the choice of the corresponding points the projection of the confocal plane is displayed in both images. The operator aligns 2-D Bezier curves with the vessel segment in both images. The program automatically adjusts the curve in the second image, maintaining a constant projection of the same 3-D Bezier curve. A corresponding 3-D Bezier function is well defined by the alignments of these 2-D Bezier functions with the coronary arteries and vice versa. The interactive procedure was designed to optimize the time for a reliable coronary tree reconstruction