HUG-VAS: A Hierarchical NURBS-Based Generative Model for Aortic Geometry Synthesis and Controllable Editing
This work addresses the need for accurate vascular geometry modeling in cardiovascular diagnosis and treatment planning, offering a novel framework for controllable editing and synthesis, though it is incremental in advancing statistical shape modeling with new techniques.
The paper tackled the problem of generating realistic aortic geometries for cardiovascular applications by introducing HUG-VAS, a hierarchical NURBS-based generative model that integrates diffusion processes, which synthesized anatomically faithful aortas with biomarker distributions matching the original dataset from 21 patient samples.
Accurate characterization of vascular geometry is essential for cardiovascular diagnosis and treatment planning. Traditional statistical shape modeling (SSM) methods rely on linear assumptions, limiting their expressivity and scalability to complex topologies such as multi-branch vascular structures. We introduce HUG-VAS, a Hierarchical NURBS Generative model for Vascular geometry Synthesis, which integrates NURBS surface parameterization with diffusion-based generative modeling to synthesize realistic, fine-grained aortic geometries. Trained with 21 patient-specific samples, HUG-VAS generates anatomically faithful aortas with supra-aortic branches, yielding biomarker distributions that closely match those of the original dataset. HUG-VAS adopts a hierarchical architecture comprising a denoising diffusion model that generates centerlines and a guided diffusion model that synthesizes radial profiles conditioned on those centerlines, thereby capturing two layers of anatomical variability. Critically, the framework supports zero-shot conditional generation from image-derived priors, enabling practical applications such as interactive semi-automatic segmentation, robust reconstruction under degraded imaging conditions, and implantable device optimization. To our knowledge, HUG-VAS is the first SSM framework to bridge image-derived priors with generative shape modeling via a unified integration of NURBS parameterization and hierarchical diffusion processes.