Filtering and Characterization of Vascular Network

Micro Computed Tomography (micro-CT) has emerged in recent years as the preferred modality for vascular studies, because it provides high-resolution 3D volumetric data suitable for analysis, quantification, validation, and visualization of results, at the level of an organ or set of tissues. This particular study is aimed to screen potential vascular morphogenesis impairment of adult mice in which some of the core PCP (planar cell polarity signalling) genes were absent. Thus, multiple voxel models of scanned mouse kidneys were processed by extracting the vascular structure which was then geometrically characterized. This was done using skeletization, distance transformation and other advanced approaches of mathematical morphology. The output was then used for automated reconstruction and level ordering of the vascular tree.