Your Donations in Action: Davis Vigneault, MD, DPhil

Abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA) affects more than one million Americans and is often asymptomatic until rupture, when morbidity and mortality rise sharply. Current surveillance and treatment decisions continue to rely primarily on maximum aortic diameter, a single linear measurement that can be vulnerable to error near treatment thresholds and may not capture other important morphologic features or patterns of aneurysm deformation.

For his 2024 RSNA Research Resident Grant, Davis Vigneault, MD, DPhil, who since accepted a position as assistant professor of radiology at Stanford University in California, sought to develop an automated pipeline for segmentation, modeling, longitudinal registration and visualization of AAA deformation on CT angiography (CTA).

Dr. Vigneault and colleagues compared three approaches for registering baseline and follow-up CTAs: a deep-learning approach, a traditional b-spline image registration and a mesh-registration-based technique called simultaneous subdivision surface registration (SiSSR), which Dr. Vigneault had developed as a graduate student in the context of cardiac imaging.

The team found that SiSSR significantly outperformed the other methods, achieving highly accurate, submillimeter results. They successfully applied SiSSR to quantify both long-term aneurysm growth and the subtle, intracycle deformations caused by cardiac pulsatility. To support clinical translation, they also developed an open-source, interactive and highly flexible web-based tool for simultaneously visualizing the volumetric imaging inputs and the corresponding 3D surface map outputs.

“Our method provides a more accurate, personalized AAA risk assessment by identifying focal high-strain areas missed by diameter measurements, which we expect to be helpful in guiding surgical timing,” Dr. Vigneault said. “This submillimeter precision is also essential for clinical trials testing new drugs to slow aneurysm growth, where the ability to detect very subtle changes is key to proving a therapy's effectiveness.”

Dr. Vigneault added that the tool makes these advanced biomechanical insights intuitive and actional within radiology workflows.

The R&E Foundation grant helped Dr. Vigneault build momentum as an early-career physician-scientist and has helped generate the preliminary data for an upcoming National Institutes of Health grant application.

“It provided the opportunity to demonstrate that I could secure extramural funding and independently lead a research project from conception to completion,” Dr. Vigneault said.

For More Information

Learn more about R&E Foundation funding opportunities.

Read our previous Your Donations in Action story.