Automated Curved and Multiplanar Reformation for Screening of the Proximal Coronary Arteries in MR Angiography

Abstract

Congenital anomalies of the coronary ostia can lead to sudden death. A screening solution would be useful to prevent adverse outcomes for the affected individuals. To be considered for integration into clinical routine, such a procedure must meet strict constraints in terms of invasiveness, time and user interaction. Imaging must be fast and seamlessly integrable into the clinical process. Non-contrast enhanced coronary magnetic resonance angiography (MRA) is well suited for this. Furthermore, planar reformations proved effective to reduce the acquired volumetric datasets to 2D images. These usually require time consuming user interaction, though. To fulfill the aforementioned challenges, we present a fully automated solution for imaging and reformatting of the proximal coronary arteries which enables rapid screening of these. The proposed pipeline consists of: (I) highly accelerated single breath-hold MRA data acquisition, (II) coronary ostia detection and vessel centerline extraction, and (III) curved planar reformation of the proximal coronary arteries, as well as multiplanar reformation of the coronary ostia. The procedure proved robust and effective in ten volunteer data sets. Imaging of the proximal coronary arteries took 24 ± 5 s and was successful within one breath-hold for all patients. The extracted centerlines achieve an overlap of 0.76 ± 0.18 compared to the reference standard and the average distance of the centerline points from the spherical surface for reformation was 1.1 ± 0.51 mm. The promising results encourage further experiments on patient data, particularly in coronary ostia anomaly screening.

The effect of the surgical approach and cochlear implant electrode on the structural integrity of the cochlea in human temporal bones

“…In addition, assessment of LW array positioning by conventional CT analysis appeared to be difficult. An adaptation of a reconstruction CT technique using curved reconstructions 30 , 31 showed superior results, correlating significantly better with histological outcomes than the conventional technique. This technique, which is readily available in clinical medical care, might be useful for radiological assessment of pathologies concerning the cochlea and vestibular organ, and other pathologies involving complex shaped bony tube-shaped structures (e.g.…”

Multi-Resolution 3D Convolutional Neural Networks for Automatic Coronary Centerline Extraction in Cardiac CT Angiography Scans

“…There are many techniques to visualize the coronary arteries in CCTA images such as maximum intensity projection (MIP), volume rendering techniques (VRT), multiplanar reformatting (MPR) and curved multiplanar reformatting (cMPR) [1]. Such advanced visualization techniques facilitate image reading and are, for example, used to guide stenosis and plaque detection [19] and quantification. The computation of MPRs and cMPRs typically relies on centerlines of the coronary arteries.…”

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“…In addition, assessment of LW array positioning by conventional CT analysis appeared to be difficult. An adaptation of a reconstruction CT technique using curved reconstructions (Achenbach et al 1998;Stimpel et al 2018) showed superior results, correlating significantly better with histological outcomes than the conventional technique. This technique, which is readily available in clinical medical care, might be useful for radiological assessment of pathologies concerning the cochlea and vestibular organ, and other pathologies involving complex shaped bony tube-shaped structures (e.g.…”