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Paper details
Number 1 - March 2014
Volume 24 - 2014
Recognition of atherosclerotic plaques and their extended dimensioning with computerized tomography angiography imaging
Tomasz Markiewicz, Mirosław Dziekiewicz, Marek Maruszyński, Romana Bogusławska-Walecka, Wojciech Kozłowski
Abstract
In this paper the authors raise the issue of automatic discrimination of atherosclerotic plaques within an artery lumen based
on numerical and statistical thresholding of Computerized Tomography Angiographic (CTA) images and their advanced
dimensioning as a support for preoperative vessel assessment. For the study, a set of tomograms of the aorta, as well as
the ilio-femoral and femoral arteries were examined. In each case a sequence of about 130–480 images of the artery cutoff
planes were analyzed prior to their segmentation based on morphological image transformation. A crucial step in the
staging of atherosclerotic alteration is recognition of the plaque in the CTA image. To solve this problem, statistical and
linear fitting methods, including the least-squares approximation by polynomial and spline polynomial functions, as well
as the error fitting function were used. Also, new descriptors of atherosclerotic changes, such as the lumen decrease factor,
the circumference occupancy factor, and the convex plaque area factor, are proposed as a means of facilitating preoperative
vessel examination. Finally, ways to reduce the computational time are discussed. The proposed methods can be very useful
for automatic quantification of atherosclerotic changes visualized by CTA imaging.
Keywords
computed tomography, atherosclerotic plaque, image processing, approximation