Modules:VMTK in 3D Slicer Tutorial: Coronary Artery Centerline Extraction
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Contents
Background
| Coronary heart disease (CHD) is the leading cause of death in high-income countries and one of the main causes of death worldwide [WHO2008]. The primary cause for CHD is atherosclerosis of the coronary arteries and is called coronary artery disease (CAD). Plaque within the walls of the coronaries narrows the lumen of the affected vessels (so-called stenosis) and disturbs the regularization abilities of the vessel walls. Consequently this reduces the blood flow inside the affected vessels and constrains the supply of oxygen and nutrients to the myocardium. Beside of heart pain, symptoms of the CHD can appear as heart-rhythm-disturbances, cardiac insufficiency, angina-pectoris-attacks, cardiac infarcts or sudden cardiac deaths [HJ07, pp307].
Medical imaging is used for the diagnosis of CAD and for the quantification and grading of stenosis. The extraction of the central lumen line (centerline) of coronary arteries are helpful for visualization purposes, stenosis quantification or further processing steps (e.g. reformatting) [Schaap2009]. This tutorial shows how to use tools based on the Vascular Modeling Toolkit ([Antiga2008]) in 3D Slicer to segment the right coronary artery (A. coronaria dextra) in a computed tomography angiography (CTA) volume and extract the associated centerline. In particular the segmentation is performed on a CTA dataset which was obtained through the Rotterdam Coronary Artery Algorithm Evaluation Framework ([Schaap2009]). |
