Interactive curved planar reformation based on snake model.

Visualization of tortuous tissues such as tracheas plays a very important role in medical image processing. Displaying them in a curved plane for diagnosis is a better function which is called curved planar reformation (CPR). In this manuscript, we use snake model to generate contours of tubular structures in all slices selected by users of medical volume data sets. Then, centerline of these structures can be obtained. CPR of these structures segmented by snake model is realized based on the obtained contours and centerlines. We use B-spline to generate a contour along tubular structures through points determined by mouse in three view planes. An improved method is used to initialize a snake contours before using gradient vector flow (GVF) snake model generating the final contour. A head aneurysm data set scanned with computed tomography (CT) is used to illustrate the performance of our CPR method. Furthermore some enhancements are introduced to our method: adjustment of window width and window level, rotating CPR.