Hello I have what looks like connections from Superior Vena Cava to Aorta. They look real, but are they? They have vessel walls and curve.
Chances are that there is no abnormal anatomy, but you’ll get better help if you post one or two well targeted pictures, or best, by sharing the dataset duly anonymised.
The second picture shows the vessel where the flow is marked on the first, plus another possible connection.
Thanks
It appears that the intensity range inside the aorta overlaps much with that of the superior vena cava. Volume rendering is not the best method to diagnose a fistula. The slice views will be more helpful here. Moreover, the vein is not dilated at all, it would have been so should a fistula exist. And it’s hard to imagine 2 fistulas at once. Clinical history is of paramount importance here.
If you play with the ‘Shift’ slider in Volume rendering, the marked suspicious regions will disappear on one end of the slider and more of them may appear in the other direction. But the slice views will answer your question here.
Thank you I will give that a try, I’m new to this! It looks like there is a connection to the right pulmonary artery in the same area, which seems wildly improbable, but may relieve the svc pressure if it is real.
Does that mean the tool will draw vessel wall around an artefact?
There appears to be a few abnormalities in this same area. I was expecting narrowing of the aorta, there is a loud aortic murmur, dyspnea, tachycardia, claudication, flat bp response on cpet and unequal arm pressures. The aorta is not narrowed, but if it was ‘leaking’ that could explain some of that.
No. Nothing in the pictures can confirm a leak from the aorta into any surrounding vessel.
An ultrasound duplex scan will make a better assessment of the heart’s status and of the big vessels.
If by tool you mean Volume rendering, no. This module does not draw anything. It displays a view of the dataset through what can be called a filter for simplicity, the parameters of which can be easily modified in the module. It’s an intensity based tool. Anatomy, tissues, artefacts … all these have meaning for us, not for software nor machines, be it the best current LLM.
If you want to isolate anatomical structures, that’s called Segmentation.
This means that it will take you many moons to become proficient enough for clinical usage of Slicer. It’s doable, but you have to persevere with constancy. For now, I would advise to refrain from jumping to conclusions.
Yes that is what I meant, I was trying to find out if the vessel walls were somehow a graphic effect rather than a translation of data.
Thanks for your help