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H. Miao, G. Mistelbauer, C. Nasel, E. Gröller:
"CoWRadar: Visual Quantification of the Circle of Willis in Stroke Patients";
Talk: Eurographics Workshop on Visual Computing for Biology and Medicine (VCBM), Chester, United Kingdom; 2015-09-14 - 2015-09-15; in: "VCBM 15: Eurographics Workshop on Visual Computing for Biology and Medicine", (2015), ISBN: 978-3-905674-82-8; 1 - 10.

This paper presents a method for the visual quantification of cerebral arteries, known as the Circle of Willis (CoW).
The CoW is an arterial structure that is responsible for the brain´s blood supply. Dysfunctions of this arterial circle
can lead to strokes. The diagnosis relies on the radiologist´s expertise and the software tools used. These tools
consist of very basic display methods of the volumetric data without support of advanced technologies in medical
image processing and visualization. The goal of this paper is to create an automated method for the standardized
description of cerebral arteries in stroke patients in order to provide an overview of the CoW´s configuration. This
novel display provides visual indications of problematic areas as well as straightforward comparisons between
multiple patients. Additionally, we offer a pipeline for extracting the CoW from Time-of-Flight Magnetic Resonance
Angiography (TOF-MRA) data sets. An enumeration technique for the labeling of the arterial segments is therefore
suggested. We also propose a method for detecting the CoW´s main supplying arteries by analyzing the coronal,
sagittal and transverse image planes of the data sets. We evaluated the feasibility of our visual quantification
approach in a study of 63 TOF-MRA data sets and compared our findings to those of three radiologists. The
obtained results demonstrate that our proposed techniques are effective in detecting the arteries of the CoW.

http://dx.doi.org/10.2312/vcbm.20151203

http://publik.tuwien.ac.at/files/PubDat_242051.pdf