Abstract:
Cerebral aneurysms are a pathological vessel dilatation that bear a high risk
of rupture. For the understanding and evaluation of the risk of rupture, the
analysis of hemodynamic information plays an important role. Besides
quantitative hemodynamic information, also qualitative flow characteristics,
e.g., the inflow jet and impingement zone are correlated with the risk of
rupture. However, the assessment of these two characteristics is currently
based on an interactive visual investigation of the flow field, obtained by
computational fluid dynamics (CFD) or blood flow measurements. We present an
automatic and robust detection as well as an expressive visualization of
these characteristics. The detection can be used to support a comparison,
e.g., of simulation results reflecting different treatment options. Our
approach utilizes local streamline properties to formalize the inflow jet and
impingement zone. We extract a characteristic seeding curve on the ostium, on
which an inflow jet boundary contour is constructed. Based on this boundary
contour we identify the impingement zone. Furthermore, we present several
visualization techniques to depict both characteristics expressively.
Thereby, we consider accuracy and robustness of the extracted
characteristics, minimal visual clutter and occlusions. An evaluation with
six domain experts confirms that our approach detects both hemodynamic
characteristics reasonably.