Finding similar 2D X-ray coronary angiograms

Abstract

In clinical practice, physicians often exploit previously observed patterns in coronary angiograms from similar patients to quickly assess the state of the disease in a current patient. These assessments involve visually observed features such as the distance of a junction from the root and the tortuosity of the arteries. In this paper, we show how these visual features can be automatically extracted from coronary artery images and used for finding similar coronary angiograms from a database. Testing on a large collection has shown the method finds clinically similar coronary angiograms from patients with similar clinical history.