Patent ID: 8675940

Claim:
A method of deriving blood flow parameters from a moving three-dimensional (3D) model of a blood vessel, the method comprising: selecting a first one of a plurality of 3D time-series images of the blood vessel for registration and a second other one of the 3D time-series images for segmentation; performing a deformable image registration on the first selected image with respect to the 3D time-series images to generate a displacement field; performing a segmentation on the second selected image to generate a 3D model of the blood vessel; performing a temporal tracking on the 3D vessel model using the displacement field to generate the moving 3D vessel model; determining a reference vascular cross-sectional plane through a location of a lumen in the moving 3D model at one time within the moving 3D model; determining a plurality of target vascular cross-sectional planes at multiple times via temporal tracking of the reference vascular cross-sectional plane based on the displacement field; determining a plurality of contours based on an intersection of the target vascular cross-sectional planes with the moving 3D vessel model at multiple times within the model wherein each contour corresponds to a different one of the multiple times; and determining a blood flow parameter of the vessel from intersections of each contour of a given one of the times with a phase contrast magnetic resonance (PC-MRI) image of the blood vessel from the corresponding time.