4-D tomographic representation of coronary arteries from one rotational X-ray sequence

Abstract

We present a complete and fully automatic method to compute a 4-D tomographic representation of coronary arteries from one single rotational monoplane X-ray sequence. The major steps of our method are the following: (1) images filtering, (2) arteries segmentation, (3) arteries matching and reconstruction, (4) parametric deformation field computation, and (5) deformation-compensated tomographic reconstruction. Steps (2) and (3) involve only a few frames, acquired at the same cardiac cycle phase, while the steps (1), (4), and (5) use the frames acquired at all cardiac cycle phases. The originality of the presented work mainly lies in the last two steps that result in a 4-D tomographic representation, allowing for the visualization of coronary arteries anatomy from any point of view, and at any cardiac cycle time. Experiments have been conducted on one synthetic data set and on 10 patient data sets. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.