School of Information Science and Technology, Zhongkai University of Agriculture and Engineering, Zhongkai Road 501#, Guangzhou, 510225, Guangdong, China.
J Med Syst. 2015 Oct;39(10):129. doi: 10.1007/s10916-015-0329-9. Epub 2015 Aug 27.
CVD (cardiovascular disease) is one of the biggest threats to human beings nowadays. An early and quantitative diagnosis of CVD is important in extending lifespan and improving people's life quality. Coronary artery stenosis can prevent CVD. To diagnose the degree of stenosis, the inner diameter of coronary artery needs to be measured. To achieve such measurement, the coronary artery is segmented by using a method that is based on morphology and the continuity between computed tomography image slices. A centerline extraction method based on mechanical simulation is proposed. This centerline extraction method can figure out a basic framework of the coronary artery by simulating pixel dots of the artery image into mass points. Such mass points have tensile forces, with which the outer pixel dots can be drawn to the center. Subsequently, the centerline of the coronary artery can be outlined by using the local line-fitting method. Finally, the nearest point method is adopted to measure the inner diameter. Experimental results showed that the methods proposed in this paper can precisely extract the centerline of the coronary artery and can accurately measure its inner diameter, thereby providing a basis for quantitative diagnosis of coronary artery stenosis.
心血管疾病（CVD）是当今人类面临的最大威胁之一。早期和定量诊断 CVD 对于延长寿命和提高人们的生活质量非常重要。冠状动脉狭窄可预防 CVD。为了诊断狭窄程度，需要测量冠状动脉的内径。为了实现这种测量，需要使用基于形态和计算机断层扫描图像切片之间连续性的方法对冠状动脉进行分段。提出了一种基于力学模拟的中心线提取方法。该中心线提取方法通过将动脉图像的像素点模拟成质量点来计算出冠状动脉的基本框架。这些质量点具有张力，通过这些张力可以将外部像素点拉向中心。然后，可以使用局部拟合方法勾勒出冠状动脉的中心线。最后，采用最近点法测量内径。实验结果表明，本文提出的方法可以精确地提取冠状动脉的中心线，并准确地测量其内径，从而为冠状动脉狭窄的定量诊断提供依据。
