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Automatic evaluation of vessel diameter variation from 2D X-ray angiography

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International Journal of Computer Assisted Radiology and Surgery Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Purpose

Early detection of blood vessel pathologies can be made through the evaluation of functional and structural abnormalities in the arteries, including the arterial distensibility measure. We propose a feasibility study on computing arterial distensibility automatically from monoplane 2D X-ray sequences for both small arteries (such as coronary arteries) and larger arteries (such as the aorta).

Methods

To compute the distensibility measure, three steps were developed: First, the segment of an artery is extracted using our graph-based segmentation method. Then, the same segment is tracked in the moving sequence using our spatio-temporal segmentation method: the Temporal Vessel Walker. Finally, the diameter of the artery is measured automatically at each frame of the sequence based on the segmentation results.

Results

The method was evaluated using one simulated sequence and 4 patients’ angiograms depicting the coronary arteries and three depicting the ascending aorta. Results of the simulated sequence achieved a Dice index of 98%, with a mean squared error in diameter measurement of \(0.18\pm 0.31\) mm. Results obtained from patients’ X-ray sequences are consistent with manual assessment of the diameter by experts.

Conclusions

The proposed method measures changes in diameter of a specific segment of a blood vessel during the cardiac sequence, automatically based on monoplane 2D X-ray sequence. Such information might become a key to help physicians in the detection of variations of arterial stiffness associated with early stages of various vasculopathies.

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Funding

This study was funded by NSERC Discovery Grant (386360-2010) and Fonds de Recherche du Québec - Nature et Technologies.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Software and IT Engineering, École de technologie supérieure, Montreal, Canada

    Faten M’hiri, Luc Duong & Christian Desrosiers

  2. Department of Cardiology, Sainte-Justine Hospital, Montreal, Canada

    Nagib Dahdah & Joaquim Miró

  3. Automated Production Engineering, École de technologie supérieure, Montreal, Canada

    Mohamed Cheriet

Authors
  1. Faten M’hiri
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  2. Luc Duong
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  3. Christian Desrosiers
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  4. Nagib Dahdah
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  5. Joaquim Miró
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  6. Mohamed Cheriet
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Faten M’hiri.

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Conflict of interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Ethical approval

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki Declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

Informed consent

Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

Additional information

This research was funded by the Fonds de recherche du Quebec Nature et technologies FQRNT (www.fqrnt.gouv.qc.ca) and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada NSERC (www.nserc-crsng.gc.ca).

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Cite this article

M’hiri, F., Duong, L., Desrosiers, C. et al. Automatic evaluation of vessel diameter variation from 2D X-ray angiography. Int J CARS 12, 1867–1876 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11548-017-1639-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11548-017-1639-9

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