Coupling the viewing direction of a blood vessel's cpr view with the viewing angle on the 3d tubular structure's rendered voxel volume and/or with the c-arm geometry of a 3d rotational angiography device's c-arm system

The present invention describes a method for rendering and displaying a curved planar reformat (CPR) view (7′) of a blood vessel's 3D tubular structure (1), wherein the viewing direction of the curved planar reformat view (7′) is coupled to the viewing angle on a segmented or raw representation of the 3D tubular structure's rendered voxel volume to be visualized or, alternatively, to the C-arm geometry of a 3D rotational angiography device's C-arm system (6). The proposed method thus enables measurements on the X-ray image which do not suffer from spatial foreshortening and do not need to be calibrated. Thereby, said coupling can be performed bidirectional. According to a first aspect of the proposed method, this means that the viewing direction of the aforementioned curved planar reformat view (7′) follows the viewing angle on a segmented or raw representation of the 3D tubular structure's rendered voxel volume to be visualized, or vice versa. According to another aspect of the proposed method, this means that the viewing direction of the curved planar reformat view (7′) is set depending on the C-arm geometry given by the roll (&thetas;x), pitch (&thetas;y) and yaw angle (&thetas;z) of a 3D rotational angiography device's C-arm system (6), or vice versa.