An interactive software module for visualizing coronary arteries in CT angiography

Abstract

Abstract:Object: A new software module for coronary artery segmentation and visualization in CT Angiography (CTA) datasets is presented, which aims to interactively segment coronary arteries and visualize them in 3D with Maximum intensity projection (MIP) and volume rendering (VRT). Materials and Methods:The software was built as a plugin for an advanced open-source PACS workstation -OsiriX. The main segmentation function is based an optimized "virtual contrast injection" algorithm", which uses fuzzy connectedness of the vessel lumen to separate the contrast-filled structures from each other. The software was evaluated in 42 clinical coronary CTA datasets acquired with 64-slice CT using isotropic voxels of 0.3-0.5 mm. Results:The median processing time was 6.4min, and 100% of main branches (right coronary artery, left circumflex artery and left anterior descending artery) and 86.9% (219/252) of visible minor branches were intact. Visually correct centerlines were obtained automatically in 94.7%(321/339) of the intact branches. Conclusion:The new software is a promising tool for coronary CTA post-processing providing good overviews of the coronary artery with limited user interaction on low-end hardware, and the coronary CTA diagnosis procedure could potentially be more time-efficient than using thin-slab technique.

Integrating automatic and interactive methods for coronary artery segmentation: let the PACS workstation think ahead

“…6). The average interaction time of 3 minutes is considerably shorter than the previously reported 6 minutes average for the completely interactive procedure [7]. In the manual correction procedure, more than 80% of the branches needed none or only one extra seed region to achieve the results listed in Table 1.…”

“…(In some cases, we have noticed errors in the extracted centerline even with a segmentation that includes the reference centerline.) As discussed in our previous report [7], this grayscale connectedness method does not yield the borders of a vessel, but rather gives the vessel surrounded by a certain amount of soft tissue (as shown in Fig 4). We believe that this segmentation reduces the probability of introducing false positive lesions during the segmentation step, compared to a conventional algorithm separating the vessel from the surrounding myocardium.…”

“…The software then provides a real-time interactive analysis procedure when the user opens the data. In preliminary experiments, the software achieved higher efficiency than our former interactive method [7], and reasonable accuracy compared to manual vessel extraction.…”

“…Building on our earlier work on "virtual contrast injection" visualization [5][6][7], this paper presents a quantitative coronary CTA analysis tool, built on the open-source PACS workstation software OsiriX [8], which integrates both fully automatic and interactive methods for coronary artery extraction. The computational power of an ordinary PC is exploited by running the non-supervised coronary artery segmentation and centerline tracking in the background as soon as the images are received.…”

Making the PACS workstation a browser of image processing software: a feasibility study using inter-process communication techniques

“…The development of imaging techniques and image processing methods provides clinical physicians with powerful tools that may hopefully lead to reliable diagnosis, quantitative evaluation and intuitive visualization [10][11] [12]. In reality, each function is often associated with a particular "advanced" workstation, as one software producer may be strong at one function and weaker at some others [13] [14].…”