PORTAL-VEIN RECONSTRUCTION BASED ON TOPOLOGY

Traditionally the intrahepatic vascular anatomy is correlated to the s egment anatomy of the liver for which - following Couinaud [1] - the p ortal vein has been accepted as a guiding structure. This paper propos es a new method for the extraction and 3D-visualization of the portal vein based on Spiral CT data. Starting from a seed voxel, the algorith m expands stepwise within the structure of interest. Bifurcations are recognized and a symbolic tree is generated simultaneously which allow s for interactive identification of sub-branches, their selection and specific colouring. The method is able to extract at least three gener ations of branches of the portal vein. A volume renderer is used to vi sualize the reconstructed portal vein superimposed to a transparent vi ew of liver tissue and focal lesions. This provides a new tool for the planning of segment-oriented liver surgery (e.g. localization of lesi ons relative to the portal vein). But the method promises also to be u seful for other applications, e.g. comparative studies of liver anatom y and pathology, or portosystemic shunt operations - TIPS (transjugula r intrahepatic portosystemic shunts).