Two-Stage Generative Model for Intracranial Aneurysm Meshes with Morphological Marker Conditioning

TL;DR

AneuG is a novel two-stage VAE-based model that generates realistic intracranial aneurysm meshes conditioned on morphological markers, aiding disease study and flow simulation.

Contribution

It introduces a two-stage generative approach that captures realistic aneurysm shapes and allows conditioning on clinical measurements, improving physiological realism and control.

Findings

More accurate shape encoding with GHD tokens

Conditional generation of aneurysm meshes based on clinical measurements

Enables realistic and controlled aneurysm shape synthesis

Abstract

A generative model for the mesh geometry of intracranial aneurysms (IA) is crucial for training networks to predict blood flow forces in real time, which is a key factor affecting disease progression. This need is necessitated by the absence of a large IA image datasets. Existing shape generation methods struggle to capture realistic IA features and ignore the relationship between IA pouches and parent vessels, limiting physiological realism and their generation cannot be controlled to have specific morphological measurements. We propose AneuG, a two-stage Variational Autoencoder (VAE)-based IA mesh generator. In the first stage, AneuG generates low-dimensional Graph Harmonic Deformation (GHD) tokens to encode and reconstruct aneurysm pouch shapes, constrained to morphing energy statistics truths. GHD enables more accurate shape encoding than alternatives. In the second stage, AneuG generates parent vessels conditioned on GHD tokens, by generating vascular centreline and propagating the cross-section. AneuG's IA shape generation can further be conditioned to have specific clinically relevant morphological measurements. This is useful for studies to understand shape variations represented by clinical measurements, and for flow simulation studies to understand effects of specific clinical shape parameters on fluid dynamics. Source code and implementation details are available at https://github.com/anonymousaneug/AneuG.