A New Method for Segmentation of the Coronary Arteries of Interest and Diameter Measurement

Abstract

Cardiovascular disease is a severe threat to human health. The assessment of the degree of cardiovascular stenosis is very important for the diagnosis of cardiovascular disease. The segmentation of coronary angiographic images is the basis of analyzing the degree of stenosis. In this paper, a method that evaluates explicitly the degree of stenosis of blood vessels of interest is proposed. This method first extracts the vessels of interest by interactive segmentation, then thins it, and then calculates the diameter by edge intersection method. The average Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC) value of the proposed segmentation method exceeds 92%, and the average Jaccard Similarity (JAC) value is over 86%. The area under the ROC curve value of the method is larger than the u-net method and the multiscale Hessian method. The results indicate that the interactive method can have good segmentation results and meet the general segmentation requirements. The qualitative and quantitative evaluation of the diameter measurement effect also shows that the effect of the corresponding diameter measurement method can reflect the change of the thickness of the blood vessel and basically meet the needs of clinical use.

Keywords

• Coronary angiography
• vessel segmentation
• diameter measurement
• thinning algorithm