Modeling and objectification of blood vessel calcification with using of multiregional segmentation

Abstract

Abstract In a clinical practice of the angiography, the blood vessel analysis is substantially important mainly in a sense of an objectification and modeling of the pathological spots such as the blood vessel calcifications. An amount of the calcification is commonly just estimated by naked eyes; therefore, the automatic modeling may be beneficial in a context of an extraction of the blood vessel features well representing a level of the blood vessel deterioration. In this work, we have proposed a fully automatic software environment (BloodVessCalc) for processing the blood vessel images acquired by the CT (computer tomography). The main function of the SW is the multiregional image segmentation allowing for an extraction of the physiological blood vessel location from the calcification spots. This model offers the calcium score calculation in a form of amount of the calcification. In the last part of our analysis, the predictive intervals of the average value and median for calcium score are calculated.

Keywords

• Blood vessels
• Image segmentation
• Vascular calcification
• Calcium score
• CT angiography