CreaTools: A Framework to Develop Medical Image Processing Software: Application to Simulate Pipeline Stent Deployment in Intracranial Vessels with Aneurysms
Résumé
The paper presents a collaborative project that offers stand-alone software applications for end-users and a complete open-source platform to rapidly develop/prototype medical image processing work-flows with sophisticated visualization and user interactions. It builds on top of a flexible cross-platform framework (Linux, Windows and MacOS) developed in C++, which guarantees an easy connection of heterogeneous C++ modules and provides the user with libraries of high-level components to construct graphical user interfaces (GUI) including input/output (file management), display, interaction, data processing, etc. In this article, we illustrate the usefulness of this framework through a research project dealing with the study of thrombosis in intra-cranial aneurysms. Algorithms developed by the researchers, such as image segmentation, stent model generation, its interactive virtual deployment in the segmented vessels, as well as the generation of meshes necessary to simulate the blood flow through thus stented vessels, have been implemented in a user-friendly GUI with 3D visualization and interaction.