Three-dimensional coronary angiography of the perfused rat heart.

The purpose of this work was to visualize the whole three-dimensional coronary artery tree of the perfused beating rat heart using three-dimensional MRI. The spatial resolution amounts to 140 microns. Also, vessels having smaller diameters could be detected. Different strategies for the visualization of the three-dimensional coronary angiograms including maximum intensity projection, data thresholding, and segmentation, were shown. The coronary artery tree was best visualized by hysteresis threshold segmentation and subsequent surface reconstruction.