The diagnostic value of a coronary computed tomography angiography scan-based radiomics model for coronary stenosis

Abstract

Coronary artery disease (CAD) is a cardiovascular disease characterized by coronary stenosis or occlusion due to atherosclerosis, which may result in a number of symptoms, including myocardial ischemia, angina and heart failure. Coronary computed tomography angiography (CCTA) is a diagnostic assessment for CAD. Radiology encompasses a vast amount of quantitative, high-dimensional features and transform medical images into a rich dataset that can be explored for insights. This study introduces an approach leveraging radiology features for the automated detection of coronary artery stenosis. We extract curved planar reconstruction (CPR) images along with the segmentation of the coronary arteries from three-dimensional CCTA images and extract radiomic features from the segmented regions of interest. Considering the high-dimensional nature of radiology features, we utilize techniques like LASSO regression to reduce the dimensionality of these features. We construct a graph convolutional network (GCN) block to fuse radiomic features and deep features embed this block within an encoder-decoder network. In the visualization analysis of coronary radiology features, there is a qualitative distinction between lipid and calcification regions, demonstrating the diagnostic value of radiology in coronary stenosis detection.