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Validation of right coronary artery lumen area from cardiac computed tomography against intravascular ultrasound

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Abstract

Quantification of coronary artery disease (CAD) from cardiac computed tomography angiography (CTA) is important both structurally (lumen area stenosis) and functionally (combined with computational fluid dynamics to determine fractional flow reserve) for assessment of ischemic stenosis and to guide treatment. Hence, it is important to have CTA image processing technique for segmentation and reconstruction of coronary arteries. In this study, we developed segmentation and reconstruction techniques, based on fast marching and Runge–Kutta methods for centerline extraction, and surface mesh generation. The accuracy of the reconstructed models was validated with direct intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) measurements in 1950 cross sections within 4 arteries. High correlation was found between CTA and IVUS measurements for lumen areas (\(r=0.993\), \(p<0.001\)). Receiver-operating characteristic (ROC) curves showed excellent accuracies for detection of different cutoff values of cross-lumen area (5 \(\text {mm}^2\), 6 \(\text {mm}^2\), 7 \(\text {mm}^2\) and 8 \(\text {mm}^2\), all ROC values >0.99). We conclude that our technique has sufficient accuracy for quantifying coronary lumen area. The accuracy and efficiency demonstrated that our approach can facilitate quantitative evaluation of coronary stenosis and potentially help in real-time assessment of CAD.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grants 61471297, 61771397 and 61801393, in part by the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation under Grant 2017M623245, in part by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities under Grant 3102018zy031, and in part by the National Medical Research Council (NMRC/BnB/1007/2015).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. National Engineering Laboratory for Integrated Aero-Space-Ground-Ocean Big Data Application Technology, School of Computer Science and Engineering, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an, 710072, China

    Hengfei Cui, Yong Xia & Yanning Zhang

  2. Centre for Multidisciplinary Convergence Computing (CMCC), School of Computer Science and Engineering, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an, 710072, China

    Hengfei Cui & Yong Xia

  3. National Heart Centre Singapore, 5 Hospital Drive, Singapore, 169609, Singapore

    Liang Zhong

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  1. Hengfei Cui
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  2. Yong Xia
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Correspondence to Yong Xia.

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Cui, H., Xia, Y., Zhang, Y. et al. Validation of right coronary artery lumen area from cardiac computed tomography against intravascular ultrasound. Machine Vision and Applications 29, 1287–1298 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00138-018-0978-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00138-018-0978-z

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