Measuring arterial tortuosity in the cerebrovascular system using Time-of-Flight MRI.

ABSTRACT: The Circle of Willis (CW) is a critical cerebrovascular structure that supports collateral blood flow to maintain brain perfusion and compensate for eventual occlusions. Increased tortuosity of high-risk vessels within the CW has been implicated as a marker in the progression of cerebrovascular diseases especially in structures like the internal carotid artery (ICA). This is partly due to age-related plaque deposition or arterial stiffening. Producing reliable tortuosity measurements for vessels segmented from magnetic resonance (MR) time-of-flight (TOF) images requires precise curvature estimation, but existent methods struggle with noisy or sparse segmentation data. We introduce an open-source, end-to-end pipeline that uses unit-speed spline fitting for accurate curvature estimation, gen

SUBMITTER: Pan Y 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11703313 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature