Three-Dimensional Coronary Artery Centerline Extraction and Cross Sectional Lumen Quantification from CT Angiography Images

摘要

Automatic centerline extraction based on 3D coronary artery segmentation results is a very important step before quantitative evaluation of intravascular lumen cross-section. In this paper, a method based on the combination of fast marching and gradient vector flow (GVF) is proposed to extract the centerline of the complete coronary artery tree in 3D angiographic images. With the centerline of blood vessel, we propose an automatic method to extract the cross-section of blood vessel lumen. This method calculates the tangent vector based on the two adjacent centerline points before and after the midline point, and then calculates the cross-sectional equation through the centerline point, and then obtains the cross-sectional contour of the cross-section and the surface mesh of blood vessel. The new method is designed to extract the cross-section of 3D intravascular lumen in real physical coordinates, which avoids the traditional interpolation processing in pixel coordinates and improves the accuracy of cross-section extraction. Given the accuracy and efficiency, the proposed coronary artery lumen area measurement algorithm can facilitate quantitative assessment of the anatomic severity of coronary stenosis.