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Fast Marching and Runge–Kutta Based Method for Centreline Extraction of Right Coronary Artery in Human Patients

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Abstract

The CT angiography (CTA) is a clinically indicated test for the assessment of coronary luminal stenosis that requires centerline extractions. There is currently no centerline extraction algorithm that is automatic, real-time and very accurate. Therefore, we sought to (i) develop a hybrid approach by incorporating fast marching and Runge–Kutta based methods for the extraction of coronary artery centerlines from CTA; (ii) evaluate the accuracy of the present method compared to Van’s method by using ground truth centerline as a reference; (iii) evaluate the coronary lumen area of our centerline method in comparison with the intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) as the standard of reference. The proposed method was found to be more computationally efficient, and performed better than the Van’s method in terms of overlap measures (i.e., OV: \(65.6\pm 14.3\) vs. \(75.6\pm 15.6\); OF: \(73.1\pm 9.0\) vs. \(80.0\pm 11.2\); and OT: \(46.9\pm 5.5\) vs. \(56.3\pm 9.2\), all \(p<0.05\)). In comparison with IVUS derived coronary lumen area, the proposed approach was more accurate than the Van’s method. This hybrid approach by incorporating fast marching and Runge–Kutta based methods could offer fast and accurate extraction of centerline as well as the lumen area. This method may garner wider clinical potential as a real-time coronary stenosis assessment tool.

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Acknowledgments

The study is partially supported by Biomedical Research Council Research Grant (14/1/32/24/002), BMRC-NMRC Grant (BnB14Nov001) and research grant from the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), SERC Biomedical Engineering Programme (1321480008). We are very grateful to the National Heart Centre Singapore for the DICOM data set.

Conflict of Interest

Author Hengfei Cui, Author Desheng Wang, Author Min Wan, Author Jun-Mei Zhang, Author Xiaodan Zhao, Author Ru San Tan, Author Weimin Huang, Author Wei Xiong, Author Yuping Duan, Author Jiayin Zhou, Author Tong Luo, Author Ghassan S. Kassab and Author Liang Zhong declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Statement of Human Studies

All procedures followed were in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation (institutional and national) and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2000 (5). Informed consent was obtained from all patients for being included in the study.

Statement of Animal Studies

No animal studies were carried out by the authors for this article.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, 21 Nanyang Link, Singapore, 637371, Singapore

    Hengfei Cui & Desheng Wang

  2. School of Information Engineering, Nanchang University, No. 999 Xuefu Dadao, Nanchang, 330031, Jiangxi, People’s Republic of China

    Min Wan

  3. National Heart Centre Singapore, 5 Hospital Drive, Singapore, 169609, Singapore

    Jun-Mei Zhang, Xiaodan Zhao, Ru San Tan & Liang Zhong

  4. Duke-NUS Medical School, Singapore, 169857, Singapore

    Ru San Tan & Liang Zhong

  5. Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R), 1 Fusionopolis Way, #21-01 Connexis (South Tower), Singapore, 138632, Singapore

    Weimin Huang, Wei Xiong, Yuping Duan & Jiayin Zhou

  6. California Medical Innovations Institute, San Diego, CA, 92121, USA

    Tong Luo & Ghassan S. Kassab

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  1. Hengfei Cui
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  2. Desheng Wang
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  12. Ghassan S. Kassab
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  13. Liang Zhong
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Liang Zhong.

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Associate Editor Stephen B. Knisley oversaw the review of this article.

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Cui, H., Wang, D., Wan, M. et al. Fast Marching and Runge–Kutta Based Method for Centreline Extraction of Right Coronary Artery in Human Patients. Cardiovasc Eng Tech 7, 159–169 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13239-016-0263-0

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