A new method of three‐dimensional coronary artery reconstruction from X‐ray angiography: Validation against a virtual phantom and multislice computed tomography

Abstract

Objective: To develop and implement a method for three-dimensional (3D) reconstruction of coronary arteries from conventional monoplane angiograms. Background: 3D reconstruction of conventional coronary angiograms is a promising imaging modality for both diagnostic and interventional purposes. Methods: Our method combines image enhancement, automatic edge detection, an iterative method to reconstruct the centerline of the artery and reconstruction of the diameter of the vessel by taking into consideration foreshortening effects. The X-Ray-based 3D coronary trees were compared against phantom data from a virtual arterial tree projected into two planes as well as computed tomography (CT)-based coronary artery reconstructions in patients subjected to coronary angiography. Results: Comparison against the phantom arterial tree demonstrated perfect agreement with the developed algorithm. Visual comparison against the CT-based reconstruction was performed in the 3D space, in terms of the direction angle along the centerline length of the left anterior descending and circumflex arteries relative to the main stem, and location and take-off angle of sample bifurcation branches from the main coronary arteries. Only minimal differences were detected between the two methods. Inter-and intraobserver variability of our method was low (intra-class correlation coefficients > 0.8). Conclusion: The developed method for coronary artery reconstruction from conventional angiography images provides the geometry of coronary arteries in the 3D space. '

Reconstruction of coronary arteries from X-ray angiography: A review

“…For this purpose, the salient points (e.g. start/end, flexion and bifurcation points) that are extracted during the segmentation step are exploited (Hoffmann et al, 2000;Carroll, 2000, 2003;Andriotis et al, 2008). A set of corresponding points are formed via manual establishment of correspondence.…”

“…Generally, rotation and translation between the X-ray sources are considered to be the geometry parameters to optimize, and intrinsic parameters are assumed to be known. The energy function mainly consists of the reprojection error of points and the reprojection error of direction vectors Carroll, 2000, 2003;Andriotis et al, 2008). Another popular way is to estimate geometry parameters jointly with the reconstruction.…”

“…The simplistic approach is to use hard epipolar constraints to establish the correspondences (Hoffmann et al, 2000;Carroll, 2000, 2003;Andriotis et al, 2008). However, epipolar lines usually do not produce a single match and this necessitates more sophisticated approaches.…”

“…In such cases, additional information from multiple views could assist the correspondence establishment (Liao et al, 2010). Finally, multiple images provide additional diameter measurements, which could be used to improve surface reconstruction (Cong et al, 2015;Movassaghi et al, 2004;Andriotis et al, 2008;Liao et al, 2010;Jandt et al, 2009b). However, necessity of manual processing from user may hinder the adoption of multi-view modelling.…”

“…The interpolation is defined as a weighted linear combination and the weights are given based on a local foreshortening value and angular difference. (Andriotis et al, 2008) observed that the plane where 3D circular cross section lies might not be perpendicular to 3D vessel axis due to the rotational movement of X-ray source (Figure 10b). They proposed a strategy to extract diameter information using the plane of 3D circular cross section.…”