Best estimate of luminal cross-sectional area of coronary arteries from angiograms.

We have reexamined the problem of estimating the luminal area of an elliptically shaped coronary artery cross section from two or more radiographic diameter measurements. The expected error is found to be much smaller than the maximum potential error. In the cases of two orthogonal views, closed form expressions have been derived for calculating the area and the uncertainty. Assuming that the underlying ellipse has limited ellipticity (major/minor axis ratio less than five), it is shown that the average uncertainty in the area is less than 14%. When more than two views are available, we suggest using a least-squares fit method to extract all available information from the data.