A teaching model of the cerebral arteries and how they look on digital subtraction angiography (DSA). Pick a catheter position, tilt the C-arm and watch the 3D anatomy and the 2D projection change together.
Conventions. LAO puts the detector on the patient's left, cranial tilts it toward the head. Images are shown as if you stand at the detector and look at the patient, so the patient's right is on your left in an AP view.
Data. Arteries are centerlines and radii extracted from one real TopBrain MRA case (University Hospital Zurich, TopCoW and TopBrain challenges), not an average. Distal branches are traced from the same MRA image and are incomplete. The brain surface and structures come from the FSL MNI152 template and the Neuromorphometrics atlas (both shipped with the atlasreader package). The vessels are placed on them by anatomy: basilar on the brain stem, M2 on the insula, distal ACA along the cingulate gyrus, A1 just above the optic chiasm. The match is approximate, within a few millimetres. Optic nerves, optic tracts, eyes, pituitary and infundibulum are schematic and positioned from the chiasm. Source: zenodo.org/records/21972006.
Extended branches. With this switch on, small cortical branches are grown from the labeled arteries across the brain surface (space colonisation, with calibres following Murray's law) so the image looks more like a real angiogram. Their density, branch lengths and angles were tuned to the real DSA sequences of the DIAS dataset. They are schematic, not patient data. Switch it off to see only what the scan shows.
Venous phase. Press Play to see the whole run: arteries fill, then fade, and the cortical veins fill and drain into the sinuses. The timing is a simple model (a short capillary delay, then flow along each vein toward the jugular veins), not a measurement.
Limits. The projection is orthographic, so there is no cone-beam magnification. Bone is schematic. Contrast flow is a simple model. Not for clinical decisions.
Medical disclaimer. For education only. Not for diagnosis, treatment decisions or procedure planning. The anatomy comes from a single case and is schematic in places.
Sources and licenses.
- Arteries: TopBrain challenge data release (University Hospital Zurich; TopCoW and TopBrain challenges), case topcow_mr_025. Open use with attribution; commercial use needs permission of the data owner. Dataset, TopBrain challenge, Yang et al., Benchmarking the CoW with the TopCoW Challenge (arXiv:2312.17670).
- Brain surface and structures: MNI152 1 mm template (FSL) and the Neuromorphometrics atlas, as shipped with the atlasreader package. Each keeps its own license; used here for non-commercial education.
- Optic nerves, tracts, eyes, pituitary: schematic models placed from the atlas optic chiasm.
- Veins: cortical veins from the VENAT atlas, Huck et al. (7 T quantitative susceptibility maps of 20 volunteers, CC BY 4.0), dataset, bioRxiv 444349. The sagittal and straight sinus, vein of Galen and internal cerebral veins come from the TopBrain CT labels of the same patient. The transverse and sigmoid sinuses and jugular veins are schematic.
- Real DSA images: DIAS dataset, Liu et al. (CC BY 4.0), resized for the web. Dataset, arXiv:2306.12153. These are real patients with vessel narrowing or occlusion, shown for comparison only.
- Software: three.js (MIT license).
This site is not for commercial use. If you want to use it commercially, the data owners must be asked first.