Automated carotid artery distensibility measurements from CTA using nonrigid registration

The distensibility of a blood vessel is a marker of atherosclerotic disease. Manual measurement of the distensibility on CTA images is a difficult task. In this paper we describe a method to automatically determine the distensibility of the carotid artery by locally analyzing the deformation field of a nonrigid registration of a series of ECG-gated CTA images. We evaluate two variants of the method, and compare the results with manually measured distensibilities.