Coronary calcification diagnosis system based on helical CT images

摘要

In this paper, we describe a computer assisted diagnosis algorithm of coronary calcifications based on helical X-ray CT images which are used at the mass screening process for lung cancer diagnosis. Our diagnostic algorithm consists of four processes: Firstly, we choose the heart slices from the CT images which was taken from the mass screening, we classify the heart slices to three section. Second, we extract the heart region on each slice by the shape of the lung area and the body of vertebra. Third, the candidate regions of the coronary calcifications are detected by the difference calculus and thresholding process. Finally, to increase the effectiveness of the diagnostic processing, we cancel the artifacts included in the candidate regions by the diagnostic rules defined by us. We show here the result of our algorithm which is applied to helical CT images of 402 patients analyzed for lung cancer screening.