CTA coronary labeling through efficient geodesics between trees using anatomy priors

Abstract

We present an efficient realization of recent work on unique geodesic paths between tree shapes for the application of matching coronary arteries to a standard model of coronary anatomy in order to label the coronary arteries. Automatically labeled coronary arteries would speed reporting for physicians. The efficiency of the approach and the quality of the results are enhanced using the relative position of detected cardiac structures. We explain how to efficiently compute the geodesic paths between tree shapes using Dijkstra's algorithm and we present a methodology to account for missing side branches during matching. For nearly all labels our approach shows promise compared with recent work and we show results for 8 additional labels. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.