The aim of this work was to compare the geometric accuracy of X-ray angiography, MRI, X-ray computed tomography (XCT), and ultrasound imaging (B-mode and IVUS) for measuring the lumen diameters of blood vessels. An image fusion method also was developed to improve these measurements. The images were acquired from a realistic phantom mimicking normal vessels of known internal diameters. After acquisition, the multimodal images were coregistered, by manual alignment of fiducial markers and then by automatic maximization of mutual information. The fusion method was performed by means of a fuzzy logic modeling approach followed by a combination process based on possibilistic logic. The data showed (i) the good geometric accuracy of XCT compared to the other methods for all studied diameters; and (ii) the good results of fused images compared to single modalities alone. For XCT, the error varied from 1.1% to 9.7%, depending on the vessel diameter that ranged from 0.93 to 6.24 mm. MRI-IVUS fusion allowed variability of measurements to be reduced up to 78%. To conclude, this work underlined both the usefulness of the vascular phantom as a validation tool and the utility of image fusion in the vascular context. Future work will consist of studying pathological vessel shapes, image artifacts and partial volume effect correction.
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