On the performance of nature inspired algorithms for the automatic segmentation of coronary arteries using Gaussian matched filters

摘要

This paper presents a comparative analysis of four nature inspired algorithms to improve the training stage of a segmentation strategy based on Gaussian matched filters (GMF) for X-ray coronary angiograms. The statistical results reveal that the method of differential evolution (DE) outperforms the considered algorithms in terms of convergence to the optimal solution. From the potential solutions acquired by DE, the area (At) under the receiver operating characteristic curve is used as fitness function to establish the best GMF parameters. The GMF-DE method demonstrated high accuracy with A(z) = 0.9402 with a training set of 40 angiograms. Moreover, to evaluate the performance of the coronary artery segmentation method compared to the ground-truth vessels hand-labeled by a specialist, measures of sensitivity, specificity and accuracy have been adopted. According to the experimental results, GMF-DE has obtained high coronary artery segmentation rate compared with six state-of-the-art methods provided an average accuracy of 0.9134 with a test set of 40 angiograms. Additionally, the experimental results in terms of segmentation accuracy, have also shown that the GMF-DE can be highly suitable for clinical decision support in cardiology. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.