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Though conventional coronary angiography (CCA) has been the standard of reference for diagnosing coronary artery disease in the past decades, computed tomography angiography (CTA) has rapidly emerged, and is nowadays widely used in clinical practice. Here, we introduce a standardized evaluation framework to reliably evaluate and compare the performance of the algorithms devised to detect and quantify the coronary artery stenoses, and to segment the coronary artery lumen in CTA data. The objective of this evaluation framework is to demonstrate the feasibility of dedicated algorithms to: (1) (semi-)automatically detect and quantify stenosis on CTA, in comparison with quantitative coronary angiography (QCA) and CTA consensus reading, and (2) (semi-)automatically segment the coronary lumen on CTA, in comparison with expert's manual annotation. A database consisting of 48 multicenter multivendor cardiac CTA datasets with corresponding reference standards are described and made available. The algorithms from 11 research groups were quantitatively evaluated and compared. The results show that (1) some of the current stenosis detection/quantification algorithms may be used for triage or as a second-reader in clinical practice, and that (2) automatic lumen segmentation is possible with a precision similar to that obtained by experts. The framework is open for new submissions through the website, at http://coronary.bigr.nl/stenoses/.

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We present a novel algorithm for image fusion from irregularly sampled data. The method is based on the framework of normalized convolution (NC), in which the local signal is approximated through a projection onto a subspace. The use of polynomial basis functions in this paper makes NC equivalent to a local Taylor series expansion. Unlike the traditional framework, however, the window function of adaptive NC is adapted to local linear structures. This leads to more samples of the same modality being gathered for the analysis, which in turn improves signal-to-noise ratio and reduces diffusion across discontinuities. A robust signal certainty is also adapted to the sample intensities to minimize the influence of outliers. Excellent fusion capability of adaptive NC is demonstrated through an application of super-resolution image reconstruction.