A Framework of Whole Heart Extracellular Volume Fraction Estimation for Low-Dose Cardiac CT Images

Xinjian Chen, Marcelo S. Nacif, Songtao Liu, Christopher Sibley, Ronald M. Summers, David A. Bluemke, Jianhua Yao
2012 IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in Biomedicine  
Cardiac CT (CCT) is widely available and has been validated for detection of focal myocardial scar using delayed enhancement technique. 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 in conditions of increased myocardial fibrosis. A framework consisting of three main steps was
more » ... proposed for CCT whole heart ECV estimation. First, a shape constrained graph cut (GC) method was proposed for myocardium and blood pool segmentation on post-contrast image. Second, the symmetric Demons deformable registration method was applied to register pre-contrast to post-contrast images. So the correspondences between the voxels from pre-contrast to post-contrast images were established. Finally, the whole heart ECV value was computed. The proposed method was tested on 20 clinical low dose CCT datasets with pre-contrast and post-contrast images. The preliminary results demonstrated the feasibility and efficiency of the proposed method.
doi:10.1109/titb.2012.2204405 pmid:22711778 pmcid:PMC3491075 fatcat:av6gifjoqfc7ledx3px56f6cii