Quantification of coronary artery Stenosis by Area Stenosis from cardiac CT angiography

Abstract

Non-invasive cardiac computed tomography angiography (CTA) is widely used to assess coronary artery stenosis and give clinical decision-making support to clinicians. The severity of stenosis lesion is commonly graded by a range of percent Diameter Stenosis (DS), which can introduce false positive diagnoses or over-estimation, triggering unnecessary further procedures. In this paper, a system and the associate methods to quantify stenosis by the percent Area Stenosis (AS) from cardiac CTA is presented. In the process, coronary artery tree is segmented and the centerline is extracted by Hessian filtering and the minimal path method. After a serial of 2D cross-sectional artery images along the artery centerline are obtained, lumen areas are segmented by ellipse-fitting with deformable models, and consequently to compute the lesion's AS. Experimental results on 5 CTA data sets show that compared to DS, AS better correlates to the reference standard for stenosis quantification, suggesting the efficacy of the proposed system.

Segmentation and Reconstruction Techniques for Modeling of Blood Vessel

“…Finally, the whole vascular structure is extracted by connecting neighboring ridge points. For quantification of stenosis using Computer tomography angiography is presented in [2].…”

“…Thus, these diseases typically affect blood flow through the vessel. This may cause severe life threatening, problems with different symptoms such as ischemia in which these blood vessels are not able to provide enough blood to tissues [2]. In this case, there is a chance of generating dead tissues due to improper blood flow.…”