Projects:BloodVesselSegmentation

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Objective:

Atherosclerosis is a systematic disease of the vessel wall that occurs in the aorta, carotid, coronary and peripheral arteries. Atherosclerotic plaques in coronary arteries may cause stenosis (narrowing) or complete occlusion of the arteries and lead to serious results such as heart attacks. Imaging techniques have greatly assisted the diagnoses and treatment procedures of atherosclerosis. Three dimensional imaging such as CTA for coronary arteries is a relatively new approach but has great potentials for detecting and evaluating coronary calcification and stenosis. Fig. 1 (b) shows an example of the 3D reconstruction of coronary arteries and the aorta.

A novel image segmentation approach is proposed combining Bayesian pixel classification method and the active surface model in a level set formulation to extract coronary arteries from CT angiography images. Fig. (2) shows the reconstructed coronary arteries from three different patients, and Fig. (3) are sample slices showing the original images and the delineated vessels as cross-sections.

Once the surface of the coronaries are reconstructed, further shape analysis and measurements can be conducted based on it. Fig. (4) shows the results of performing centerline extraction using a hamonic skeletonization technique [3]. The skeletons can then serve as a guide for finding the perpendicular planes to the arteries, and these planes are used to intersect with the vessel in order to measure the local cross-sectional areas, as shown in Fig. (5).

References:

1. Y. Yang, A. Tannenbaum, and D. Giddens, ``Segmentation of Coronary Arteries Using Bayesian Driven Implicit Surfaces, submitted to MICCAI 2006.
2. Y. Yang, A. Tannenbaum, and D. Giddens, ``Multiscale Vessel Filtering in Assisting the Generation of Patient-Specific CFD Models for Coronary Arteries, submitted to ASME 2006 Bioengineering Conference.
3. Y. Yang, L. Zhu, S. Haker, A. Tannenbaum, and D. Giddens, ``Harmonic Skeleton Guided Evaluation of Stenoses in Human Coronary Arteries, MICCAI 2005 LNCS 3749, pages 490-497, 2005.
4. Y. Yang, A. Tannenbaum, and D. Giddens, ``Segmentation and Quantification of Human Coronary Arteries Using 3D CTA Images, abstract appears in The Second Annual Memphis BioImaging Symposium, 2005. Honorable Mention for Best Poster Awards.
5. Y. Yang, A. Tannenbaum, and D. Giddens. ``Knowledge-Based 3D Segmentation and Reconstruction of Coronary Arteries Using CT Images, In Proc. of the 26th Annual Intl. Conf. of the IEEE EMBS, pages 1664-1666, 2004.
6. J. Suo, Y. Yang, J. Oshinski, A. Tannenbaum, J. Gruden, and D. Giddens, ``Flow Patterns and Wall Shear Stress Distributions at Atherosclerotic-Prone Sites in a Human Left Cornary Artery - An Exploration Using Combined Methods of CT and Computational Fluid Dynamics, In Proc. of the 26th Annual Intl. Conf. of the IEEE EMBS, pages 3789-3791, 2004.

Key Investigators:

• Yan Yang @ Georgia Tech
• Allen Tannenbaum @ Georgia Tech

Links:

• Georgia Tech Algorithms
• NA-MIC Collaborations