Suzuki Nobuaki, Sanada Shigeru, Suzuki Masayuki, Seino Kazue, Nakano Hiroyuki
Department of Radiology, Kushiro City Medical Association Hospital.
Nihon Hoshasen Gijutsu Gakkai Zasshi. 2007 Apr 20;63(4):420-7. doi: 10.6009/jjrt.63.420.
Chest radiographs provide significant information about the pacing lead for the management and follow-up of post-cardiac pacing patients. However, the pacing lead is not always clearly visible because of cardiac insertion via the mediastinum and low contrast on the chest radiograph. We developed an image-processing technique that improves visualization of the cardiac pacing lead on chest radiographs to facilitate management after pacemaker implantation. In this study, 117 chest radiographs obtained during pacemaker follow-up were analyzed. These chest images were smoothed using a median filter, sharpened by unsharp masking, then binarized by thresholding using the moving average method. To evaluate the usefulness of these processed images, four cardiologists compared the original and processed images using the two-sample preference test. As a result, visualization of the pacing lead was significantly improved on all processed images compared with that on the original images. We conclude that this image processing technique can facilitate pacemaker management.
胸部X光片可为心脏起搏术后患者的管理和随访提供有关起搏导线的重要信息。然而，由于起搏导线是经纵隔插入心脏，且在胸部X光片上对比度较低，因此并不总是能清晰可见。我们开发了一种图像处理技术，可改善胸部X光片上心脏起搏导线的可视化效果，以便于起搏器植入后的管理。在本研究中，我们分析了在起搏器随访期间获得的117张胸部X光片。这些胸部图像先用中值滤波器进行平滑处理，再通过反锐化掩膜进行锐化，然后使用移动平均法进行阈值化处理以实现二值化。为评估这些处理后图像的实用性，四位心脏病专家使用双样本偏好测试对原始图像和处理后的图像进行了比较。结果显示，与原始图像相比，所有处理后的图像中起搏导线的可视化效果均有显著改善。我们得出结论，这种图像处理技术有助于起搏器的管理。
