Abstract
Cardiac CT (CCT) is widely available and has been validated for the detection of focal myocardial scar using a delayed enhancement technique in this paper. CCT, however, has not been previously evaluated for quantification of diffuse myocardial fibrosis. In our investigation, we sought to evaluate the potential of low-dose CCT for the measurement of myocardial whole heart extracellular volume (ECV) fraction. ECV is altered under conditions of increased myocardial fibrosis. A framework consisting of three main steps was proposed for CCT whole heart ECV estimation. First, a shape-constrained graph cut (GC) method was proposed for myocardium and blood pool segmentation on postcontrast image. Second, the symmetric demons deformable registration method was applied to register precontrast to postcontrast images. So the correspondences between the voxels from precontrast to postcontrast images were established. Finally, the whole heart ECV value was computed. The proposed method was tested on 20 clinical low-dose CCT datasets with precontrast and postcontrast images. The preliminary results demonstrated the feasibility and efficiency of the proposed method.
Original language | English (US) |
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Article number | 6216417 |
Pages (from-to) | 842-851 |
Number of pages | 10 |
Journal | IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in Biomedicine |
Volume | 16 |
Issue number | 5 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - 2012 |
Externally published | Yes |
Keywords
- Cardiac CT (CCT)
- extracellular volume (ECV) fraction
- myocardium segmentation
- registration
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Biotechnology
- Computer Science Applications
- Electrical and Electronic Engineering