Providing closed and well-connected boundaries of coronary artery is essential to assist cardiologists in the diagnosis of coronary artery disease (CAD). Recently, several deep learning-based methods have been proposed for boundary detection and segmentation in a medical image. However, when applied to coronary wall detection, they tend to produce disconnected and inaccurate boundaries. In this paper, we propose a novel boundary detection method for coronary arteries that focuses on the continuity and connectivity of the boundaries. In order to model the spatial continuity of consecutive images, our hybrid architecture takes a volume (i.e., a segment of the coronary artery) as input and detects the boundary of the target slice (i.e., the central slice of the segment). Then, to ensure closed boundaries, we propose a contour-constrained weighted Hausdorff distance loss. We evaluate our method on a dataset of 34 patients of coronary CT angiography scans with curved planar reconstruction (CCTA-CPR) of the arteries (i.e., cross-sections). Experiment results show that our method can produce smooth closed boundaries outperforming the state-of-the-art accuracy.
O2CTA: Introducing Annotations from OCT to CCTA in Coronary Plaque Analysis
Dushu Lake Hospital Affiliated to Soochow University（苏州大学附属独墅湖医院）；Institution for Hypertension of Soochow University（苏州大学高血压研究所）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）
Philips Healthcare（飞利浦医疗）；Philips Research（飞利浦研究院）；Semmelweis University（塞梅尔魏斯大学）；Queen’s University（女王大学）；South Eastern Health and Social Care Trust（东南健康与社会护理信托基金）
We introduce a functional for the learning of an optimal database for patch-based image segmentation with application to coronary lumen segmentation from coronary computed tomography angiography (CCTA) data. The proposed functional consists of fidelity, sparseness and robustness to small-variations terms and their associated weights. Existing work address database optimization by prototype selection aiming to optimize the database by either adding or removing prototypes according to a set of predefined rules. In contrast, we formulate the database optimization task as an energy minimization pr…
Myocardial Region-guided Feature Aggregation Net for Automatic Coronary artery Segmentation and Stenosis Assessment using Coronary Computed Tomography Angiography
School of Computer Science and Technology, Zhengzhou University of Light Industry（郑州轻工业大学计算机与通信工程学院）；School of Information Management and Engineering, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics（上海财经大学信息管理与工程学院）；Department of Applied Computing, Michigan Technological University（密歇根理工大学应用计算系）；Health Research Institute, Michigan Technological University（密歇根理工大学健康研究所）；Department of Computer Science, Kennesaw State University（肯尼索州立大学计算机科学系）
Coronary artery disease (CAD) has posed a leading threat to the lives of cardiovascular disease patients worldwide for a long time. Therefore, automated diagnosis of CAD has indispensable significance in clinical medicine. However, the complexity of coronary artery plaques that cause CAD makes the automatic detection of coronary artery stenosis in Coronary CT angiography (CCTA) a difficult task. In this paper, we propose a Transformer network (TR-Net) for the automatic detection of significant stenosis (i.e. luminal narrowing > 50%) while practically completing the computer-assisted diagnosis …
Image Sciences Institute（影像科学研究所）；University Medical Center Utrecht（乌得勒支大学医学中心）；Department of Radiology（放射科）
Fast and accurate anatomical landmark detection can benefit many medical image analysis methods. Here, we propose a method to automatically detect anatomical landmarks in medical images. Automatic landmark detection is performed with a patch-based fully convolutional neural network (FCNN) that combines regression and classification. For any given image patch, regression is used to predict the 3D displacement vector from the image patch to the landmark. Simultaneously, classification is used to identify patches that contain the landmark. Under the assumption that patches close to a landmark can…
Philips Medical Systems Technologies Ltd.（飞利浦医疗系统技术有限公司）
Purpose: The goal of this study was to assess the potential added benefit of accounting for partial volume effects (PVE) in an automatic coronary lumen segmentation algorithm from coronary computed tomography angiography (CCTA). Materials and methods: We assessed the potential added value of PVE integration as a part of the automatic coronary lumen segmentation algorithm by means of segmentation accuracy using the MICCAI 2012 challenge framework and by means of flow simulation overall accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, negative and positive predictive values and the receiver operated characte…
Mayo Clinic（梅奥诊所）；University of Iowa（爱荷华大学）；Siemens Healthineers（西门子医疗）；NVIDIA（英伟达）
Coronary Computed Tomography Angiography (CCTA) evaluation of chest-pain patients in an Emergency Department (ED) is considered appropriate. While a negative CCTA interpretation supports direct patient discharge from an ED, labor-intensive analyses are required, with accuracy in jeopardy from distractions. We describe the development of an Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithm and workflow for assisting interpreting physicians in CCTA screening for the absence of coronary atherosclerosis. The two-phase approach consisted of (1) Phase 1 - focused on the development and preliminary testing of a…
Image Sciences Institute, University Medical Center Utrecht（乌得勒支大学医学中心影像科学研究所）；University Medical Center Utrecht（乌得勒支大学医学中心）；Utrecht University（乌得勒支大学）；Amsterdam University Medical Center（阿姆斯特丹大学医学中心）
Treatment of patients with obstructive coronary artery disease is guided by the functional significance of a coronary artery stenosis. Fractional flow reserve (FFR), measured during invasive coronary angiography (ICA), is considered the gold standard to define the functional significance of a coronary stenosis. Here, we present a method for non-invasive detection of patients with functionally significant coronary artery stenosis, combining analysis of the coronary artery tree and the left ventricular (LV) myocardium in cardiac CT angiography (CCTA) images. We retrospectively collected CCTA sca…
Image Sciences Institute, University Medical Center Utrecht（乌得勒支大学医学中心影像科学研究所）；University Medical Center Utrecht（乌得勒支大学医学中心）；Amsterdam University Medical Center（阿姆斯特丹大学医学中心）；Utrecht University（乌得勒支大学）
In patients with obstructive coronary artery disease, the functional significance of a coronary artery stenosis needs to be determined to guide treatment. This is typically established through fractional flow reserve (FFR) measurement, performed during invasive coronary angiography (ICA). We present a method for automatic and non-invasive detection of patients requiring ICA, employing deep unsupervised analysis of complete coronary arteries in cardiac CT angiography (CCTA) images. We retrospectively collected CCTA scans of 187 patients, 137 of them underwent invasive FFR measurement in 192 dif…
Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg（埃尔朗根-纽伦堡弗里德里希-亚历山大大学）；Siemens Healthcare GmbH（西门子医疗有限公司）；University Clinic Frankfurt（法兰克福大学诊所）；Cardioangiological Centrum Bethanien（贝塔尼恩心血管中心）
Assessing coronary artery plaque segments in coronary CT angiography scans is an important task to improve patient management and clinical outcomes, as it can help to decide whether invasive investigation and treatment are necessary. In this work, we present three machine learning approaches capable of performing this task. The first approach is based on radiomics, where a plaque segmentation is used to calculate various shape-, intensity- and texture-based features under different image transformations. A second approach is based on deep learning and relies on centerline extraction as sole pr…
Frangi Filters are one of the widely used filters for enhancing vessels in medical images. Since they were first proposed, the threshold of the vesselness function of Frangi Filters is to be arranged for each individual application. These thresholds are changed manually for individual fluoroscope, for enhancing coronary angiogram images. Hence it is felt, there is a need of mitigating the tuning procedure of threshold values for every fluoroscope. The current papers approach has been devised in order to treat the coronary angiogram images uniformly, irrespective of the fluoroscopes through whi…
Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg（埃尔朗根-纽伦堡弗里德里希-亚历山大大学）；Siemens Healthineers（西门子医疗）；University Clinic Frankfurt（法兰克福大学诊所）；Cardioangiological Centrum Bethanien（贝塔宁心血管中心）
Analysing coronary artery plaque segments with respect to their functional significance and therefore their influence to patient management in a non-invasive setup is an important subject of current research. In this work we compare and improve three deep learning algorithms for this task: A 3D recurrent convolutional neural network (RCNN), a 2D multi-view ensemble approach based on texture analysis, and a newly proposed 2.5D approach. Current state of the art methods utilising fluid dynamics based fractional flow reserve (FFR) simulation reach an AUC of up to 0.93 for the task of predicting a…
DeepCA: Deep Learning-based 3D Coronary Artery Tree Reconstruction from Two 2D Non-simultaneous X-ray Angiography Projections
University of Oxford（牛津大学）；Institute of Biomedical Engineering（生物医学工程研究所）；Division of Cardiovascular Medicine（心血管医学部）；Radcliffe Department of Medicine（拉德克利夫医学系）；Oxford Acute Vascular Imaging Centre（牛津急性血管成像中心）
CAD-RADS scoring of coronary CT angiography with Multi-Axis Vision Transformer: a clinically-inspired deep learning pipeline
University of Pavia（帕维亚大学）；Centro Cardiologico Monzino IRCCS（蒙齐诺心脏病学中心IRCCS）；University of Milan（米兰大学）；IRCCS Istituti Clinici Scientifici Maugeri（IRCCS莫杰里科学临床研究所）
Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg（埃尔朗根-纽伦堡大学）；Siemens Healthcare GmbH（西门子医疗有限公司）；Das Radiologische Zentrum - Radiology Center（放射中心）
Coronary CT angiography (CCTA) has established its role as a non-invasive modality for the diagnosis of coronary artery disease (CAD). The CAD-Reporting and Data System (CAD-RADS) has been developed to standardize communication and aid in decision making based on CCTA findings. The CAD-RADS score is determined by manual assessment of all coronary vessels and the grading of lesions within the coronary artery tree. We propose a bottom-up approach for fully-automated prediction of this score using deep-learning operating on a segment-wise representation of the coronary arteries. The method relies…
The Ohio State University College of Medicine（俄亥俄州立大学医学院）
We propose a fully automated algorithm based on a deep learning framework enabling screening of a coronary computed tomography angiography (CCTA) examination for confident detection of the presence or absence of coronary artery atherosclerosis. The system starts with extracting the coronary arteries and their branches from CCTA datasets and representing them with multi-planar reformatted volumes; pre-processing and augmentation techniques are then applied to increase the robustness and generalization ability of the system. A 3-dimensional convolutional neural network (3D-CNN) is utilized to mo…
Image Sciences Institute（影像科学研究所）；University Medical Center Utrecht（乌得勒支大学医学中心）；Department of Radiology（放射科）
Detection of coronary artery stenosis in coronary CT angiography (CCTA) requires highly personalized surface meshes enclosing the coronary lumen. In this work, we propose to use graph convolutional networks (GCNs) to predict the spatial location of vertices in a tubular surface mesh that segments the coronary artery lumen. Predictions for individual vertex locations are based on local image features as well as on features of neighboring vertices in the mesh graph. The method was trained and evaluated using the publicly available Coronary Artery Stenoses Detection and Quantification Evaluation …
TG-OT: Topology-guided CCTA-IVUS registration via optimal transport matching
Weill Cornell Medicine（威尔康奈尔医学院）；Cornell Tech（康奈尔科技校区）；Department of Biomedical Engineering and Physics, Amsterdam UMC, University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学医学中心生物医学工程与物理系）；Amsterdam Cardiovascular Sciences（阿姆斯特丹心血管科学研究中心）；Department of Radiology, Mayo Clinic（梅奥诊所放射学系）；Department of Cardiology, Erasmus University Medical Center（伊拉斯姆斯大学医学中心心脏病学系）
Quantification of cardiac structures in non-contrast CT (NCCT) could improve cardiovascular risk stratification. However, setting a manual reference to train a fully convolutional network (FCN) for automatic segmentation of NCCT images is hardly feasible, and an FCN trained on coronary CT angiography (CCTA) images would not generalize to NCCT. Therefore, we propose to train an FCN with virtual non-contrast (VNC) images from a dual-layer detector CT scanner and a reference standard obtained on perfectly aligned CCTA images.
Coronary computed tomography angiography (CCTA) provides detailed an-atomical information on all chambers of the heart. Existing segmentation tools can label the gross anatomy, but addition of application-specific labels can require detailed and often manual refinement. We developed a U-Net based framework to i) extrapolate a new label from existing labels, and ii) parcellate one label into multiple labels, both using label-to-label mapping, to create a desired segmentation that could then be learnt directly from the image (image- to-label mapping). This approach only required manual correctio…
University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学）；University Medical Center Utrecht（乌得勒支大学医学中心）
Deep learning-based whole-heart segmentation in coronary CT angiography (CCTA) allows the extraction of quantitative imaging measures for cardiovascular risk prediction. Automatic extraction of these measures in patients undergoing only non-contrast-enhanced CT (NCCT) scanning would be valuable. In this work, we leverage information provided by a dual-layer detector CT scanner to obtain a reference standard in virtual non-contrast (VNC) CT images mimicking NCCT images, and train a 3D convolutional neural network (CNN) for the segmentation of VNC as well as NCCT images. Contrast-enhanced acquis…
