Improving interpretation accuracy for curved planar reformation of intracranial vessel wall MRI by reducing intra-plane rotation

This work aims to develop an algorithm for straightened curved planar reformation (CPR), i.e., extracting the 2D cross-sectional images along a vessel centerline in a vessel wall MRI scan. Previous methods determine the orientation of CPR images in a fixed way, leading to undesired rotation along the centerline. Our method instead calculates the local coordinate system with respect to previous slices, thus keeping the continuity of cross-sections. Our CPR results show a better readability of the straightened vessel image, especially when one wants to utilize the spatial information among adjacent CPR slices for a more comprehensive and accurate medical analysis.