Automatic Human Heart Search on Ct-Scans

Abstract

Here is proposed a solution for actual problem of heart allocation on tomography data. One of the most popular tomography types used for various heart investigations is CT, thus the technology proposed here is initially developed for CT data. The main part of the algorithm consists of four stages: preliminary source volume limitation, forming hypotheses of lungs location, determination of approximate surrounding heart cube and searching for a point within the cube which is for sure inside the heart. The algorithm also includes a preliminary stage: coordinate system allocation. This stage is essential when position of a scanned patient is unknown relative to a tomograph. During the stage we find, where are left and right, top and bottom, front and back sides of human body. The stage consists also of four parts itself: definition of Ox and Oy axes and determination of Oy, Oz and Ox directions, by analyzing anatomy of a patient, with regard to standard human anatomy. The method is fast and doesn`t require any human guidance and preliminary adjustment. The whole method is convenient as automatic preprocessing for unlimited scope of problems, e.g. segmentation, surface or solid model reconstruction, etc. The proposed method provides flexible way for further local heart positioning refinement and works even for static, not timed, tomography data.