Three-dimensional reconstruction of the arterial wall from intravascular sonograms

A technique is presented for the three-dimensional (3D) reconstruction of arterial wall geometry from endovascular sonograms. Endovascular ultrasonic data acquisition is carried out using an in-vitro preparation of a portion of a splenic artery. The images are stored on video-tape, digitized and processed off-line using Matlab on a SUN SPARC 10 workstation. The internal (intima) vessel boundaries are computed using an appropriate Marr-Hildreth operator. The set of boundary data allows 3D viewing of the wall geometry. The results shows the method can provide the 3D vessel geometry data that are required as boundary conditions for a quantitative assessment of the flow