About

The Aneurisk project

Aneurisk is a scientific project developed in Italy from 2005 through 2008, supported by SIEMENS Medical Solutions, Italy with the collaboration of Fondazione Politecnico di Milano, Mario Negri Institute for Pharmacological Research, Bergamo, Ca' Granda Hospital, Niguarda, Milano. The project was developed in the Laboratory MOX (Modeling and Scientific Computing) of the Department of Mathematics of Politecnico di Milano, under the direction of Alessandro Veneziani (currently with the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science of Emory University). The aim of the project was to perform an extensive statistical analysis of the geometry and hemodynamics of vessels hosting a cerebral aneurysm to identify possible correlations with rupture. From DICOM images of 3D rotational angiographies, semi-automatic tools have been developed for accurate reconstruction and characterization of the geometries; these geometries have then been used for simulations of blood dynamics; finally, the integrated data (morphology + hemodynamics) have been analyzed with a principal component analysis and a quadratic discriminant analysis to correlate predictive landmarks for rupture.

The project has been then followed up with the support of the Brain Aneurysm Foundation in the USA and the Emory University Research Committee 2011-2012, whose support for the creation of the present website is gratefully acknowledged.

This website collects the data retrieved during the Project in searchable and downloadable form. In particular, it hosts DICOM images, 3D reconstructions and geometric characterizations, numerical simulations of all cases in the Aneurisk data set.

We firmly believe that sharing the data will provide the opportunity to compare results, perform validation and eventually improve the understanding and the therapy of cerebral aneurysms.

The team

• A. Veneziani (PI - MOX, Politecnico Milano & Emory University)
• M. Piccinelli (Mario Negri Institute, Bergamo & Emory University)
• T. Passerini (MOX, Politecnico Milano & Emory University)
• L. Antiga (Orobix Srl, Bergamo)
• P. Secchi (MOX, Politecnico di Milano)
• L. Sangalli (MOX, Politecnico di Milano)
• S. Vantini (MOX, Politecnico di Milano)
• S. Bacigaluppi (Policlinico Milano and Ca' Granda Hospital, Milano)
• E. Boccardi (Ca' Granda Hospital, Milano)
• A. Remuzzi (Mario Negri Institute, Bergamo & University of Bergamo)
• G. Dubini (LaBS, Politecnico di Milano)
• F. Migliavacca (LaBS, Politecnico di Milano)

Software

• www.vmtk.org
• www.lifev.org

Main publications

• L. M. Sangalli, P. Secchi, S. Vantini, A. Veneziani, A Case Study in Explorative Functional Data Analysis: Geometrical Features of the Internal Carotid Artery, Journal of the American Statistical Association, 104(485), pp. 37-48 (2009)
• L. M. Sangalli, P. Secchi, S. Vantini, A. Veneziani, Efficient estimation of 3-dimensional centerlines of inner carotid arteries and their curvature functions by free knot regression splines, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Ser. C, Applied Statistics, 58(3), pp. 285-306 (2009)
• M. Piccinelli, A. Veneziani, D. A. Steinman, A. Remuzzi, L. Antiga, A framework for geometric analysis of vascular structures: Applications to cerebral aneurysms, 28(8), IEEE Trans Biomed Imag, pp. 1141 - 1155 (2009)
• L. M. Sangalli, P. Secchi, S. Vantini and V. Vitelli , K-means alignment for curve clustering, Computational Statistics and Data Analysis, Vol. 54, pp. 1219–1233, 2010.
• M. Piccinelli, S. Bacigaluppi, E. Boccardi, B. Ene-Iordache, A. Remuzzi, A. Veneziani, L. Antiga, Influence of internal carotid artery geometry on aneurysm location and orientation: a computational geometry study, Neurosurgery, 68(5):1270-1285, 2011.
• T. Passerini, L. M. Sangalli, S. Vantini, M. Piccinelli, S. Bacigaluppi, L. Antiga, E. Boccardi, P. Secchi, A. Veneziani, An Integrated Statistical Investigation of the Internal Carotid Arteries hosting Cerebral Aneurysms, to appear in Cardiovascular Engineering and Technology (2012)

PhD Theses

• T. Passerini (MOX, Politecnico di Milano, 2008)
• S. Vantini (MOX, Politecnico di Milano, 2008)
• L. Socci (LaBS, Politecnico di Milano, 2007)

Support

• SIEMENS Medical Solutions, Italy
• Fondazione Politecnico di Milano, Italy
• Brain Aneurysm Foundation, USA
• Emory University, URC 2011, USA

Other acknowledgements

We wish to thank: David Steinman (University of Toronto), Frank Tong (Emory University), Matthew Aycock (Technical Support, Emory University)

WebGL-based 3D preview is provided through XTK. We gratefully acknowledge Daniel Haehn for supporting us during development.

This website is based on the following open source projects:

• XTK (github.com/xtk/X)
• Noir - a Clojure web framework (webnoir.org)
• Bootstrap (twitter.github.com/bootstrap)
• D3 - Data driven documents (d3js.org)
• Crossfilter (square.github.com/crossfilter)
• Fancybox (fancyapps.com/fancybox)
• JQuery (jquery.com)

Contacts

The present web site has been developed by Tiziano Passerini, Marina Piccinelli, Alessandro Veneziani (Emory) and Luca Antiga (Orobix).

For any question you can contact us at: aneurisk at mathcs dot emory dot edu.