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A supervised classification-based method for coronary calcium detection in non-contrast CT

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Abstract

Accurate quantification of coronary artery calcium provides an opportunity to assess the extent of atherosclerosis disease. Coronary calcification burden has been reported to be associated with cardiovascular risk. Currently, an observer has to identify the coronary calcifications among a set of candidate regions, obtained by thresholding and connected component labeling, by clicking on them. To relieve the observer of such a labor-intensive task, an automated tool is needed that can detect and quantify the coronary calcifications. However, the diverse and heterogeneous nature of the candidate regions poses a significant challenge. In this paper, we investigate a supervised classification-based approach to distinguish the coronary calcifications from all the candidate regions and propose a two-stage, hierarchical classifier for automated coronary calcium detection. At each stage, we learn an ensemble of classifiers where each classifier is a cost-sensitive learner trained on a distinct asymmetrically sampled data subset. We compute the relative location of the calcifications with respect to a heart-centered coordinate system, and also use the neighboring regions of the calcifications to better characterize their properties for discrimination. Our method detected coronary calcifications with an accuracy, sensitivity and specificity of 98.27, 92.07 and 98.62%, respectively, for a testing dataset of non-contrast computed tomography scans from 105 subjects.

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Notes

  1. Preliminary work on this topic has appeared in [11].

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported in part by NSF Grants IIS-0431144 and CNS-0521527.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computational Biomedicine Lab, Department of Computer Science, University of Houston, Houston, TX, 77204, USA

    Uday Kurkure, Deepak R. Chittajallu, Gerd Brunner & Yen H. Le

  2. Computational Biomedicine Lab, Departments of Computer Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering and Biomedical Engineering, University of Houston, Houston, TX, 77054, USA

    Ioannis A. Kakadiaris

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  1. Uday Kurkure
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  2. Deepak R. Chittajallu
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  3. Gerd Brunner
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  4. Yen H. Le
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  5. Ioannis A. Kakadiaris
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Correspondence to Uday Kurkure.

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Kurkure, U., Chittajallu, D.R., Brunner, G. et al. A supervised classification-based method for coronary calcium detection in non-contrast CT. Int J Cardiovasc Imaging 26, 817–828 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10554-010-9607-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10554-010-9607-2

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