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

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

M’hiri, Faten and Duong, Luc and Desrosiers, Christian and Dahdah, Nagib and Miró, Joaquim and Cheriet, Mohamed

International Journal of Computer Assisted Radiology and Surgery 2017

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 ± 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.