The R-Vessel-X Project

TL;DR

The R-Vessel-X project developed open-source tools for 3D hepatic vascular image analysis, including filtering, segmentation, and modeling, with a focus on practical software dissemination and synthetic vessel generation.

Contribution

It introduces new open-source plugins and online tools for 3D hepatic vessel segmentation and synthetic vessel generation, advancing biomedical image analysis methods.

Findings

Development of 3D vessel segmentation plugins for 3D Slicer

Creation of an online synthetic vessel generation demo

Extensive research outcomes in filtering, segmentation, and modeling

Abstract

1) Objectives: This technical report presents a synthetic summary and the principal outcomes of the project R-Vessel-X ("Robust vascular network extraction and understanding within hepatic biomedical images") funded by the French Agence Nationale de la Recherche, and developed between 2019 and 2023. 2) Material and methods: We used datasets and tools publicly available such as IRCAD, Bullitt or VascuSynth toobtain real or synthetic angiographic images. The main contributions lie in the field of 3D angiographic image analysis: filtering, segmentation, modeling and simulation, with a specific focus on the liver. 3) Results: We paid a particular attention to open-source software diffusion of the developed methods, by means of 3D Slicer plugins for the liver anatomy segmentation (SlicerRVXLiverSegmentation) and vesselness filtering (Slicer-RVXVesselnessFilters), and an online demo for the generation of synthetic and realistic vessels in 2D and 3D (OpenCCO). 4) Conclusion: The R-Vessel-X project provided extensive research outcomes, covering various topics related to 3D angiographic image analysis, such as filtering, segmentation, modeling and simulation. We also developed open-source and free softwares so that the research communities in biomedical engineering can use these results in their future research.