You are invited to attend Aaron Croasmun's Master's Thesis defense on Friday, October 5th at 10am. The defense will be held in Olmsted W209. Details about Aaron's thesis can be found below.
Title: Fast Skeletonization of Blood Vessels
Author: Aaron Croasmun
Thesis Adviser: Sukmoon Chang, Ph.D.
Abstract
The study of the morphological and rheological behaviors of intramural vessels plays a critical role in various clinical applications such as surgical planning and radiotherapy. To better understand the rheological behavior of vascular structures in relation to the network morphology, we must obtain the concrete measurements of the morphometric parameters of the vascular networks under various conditions. Morphometric parameters of the networks include vessel diameter, branching points, branch end points, branch length, and branching angles. Because of the complexity of blood vessel morphology, however, it is diffi cult to obtain accurate measurements. In this thesis, we present a novel and effi cient method for skeletonization of intramural vessel networks. The proposed method automatically skeletonizes the vascular network in a given image and constructs a graph structure that represents the branching structures of the network. Since the method processes a given image as a whole, the multiple vascular networks present in the image are automatically detected and skeletonized simultaneously. Moreover, since the skeletons are represented as graph structures, various morphometric parameters can be obtained automatically. We present the promising results of the proposed method applied to the complex structure of retinal vessel networks.
