Integrating automatic and interactive method for coronary artery segmentation : let PACS workstation think ahead

摘要

Purpose: To provide an efficient method to extract useful information from the increasing amount of coronary CTA. Methods: A quantitative coronary CTA analysis tool was built on OsiriX, which integrates both fully automatic and interactive methods for coronary artery extraction. The computational power of an ordinary PC is exploited by running the non-supervised coronary artery segmentation and centerline tracking in the background as soon as the images are received. When the user opens the data, the software provides a real-time interactive analysis environment. Results: The average overlap between the centerline created in our software and the reference standard was 96.0%. The average distance between them was 0.38 mm. The automatic procedure runs for 3-5 min as a single-thread application in background. Interactive processing takes 3 min in average. Conclusion: In preliminary experiments, the software achieved higher efficiency than the former interactive method, and reasonable accuracy compared to manual vessel extraction.