Morphology Reconstruction of Obstructed Coronary Artery in Angiographic Images

In cardiac arterial interventional therapy, coronary angiograms provides key information to physicians for treatment strategy selection. However, it is hard to extract the information about arteries with CTO lesion in absence of contrast opacification and visualization of the CTO coronary arteries in angiograms. In this paper, we present an algorithm, which can predict the extension direction of artery with CTO and reconstruct the morphology of blocked artery in coronary angiograms. First, our algorithm segment the CTO artery angiogram and extract the artery skeleton. Second, an iterative approach is preformed to reconstruct the skeleton of blocked artery. Finally, our algorithm generates the simulated postoperative angiogram according to the skeleton image. The results demonstrate that automatic morphology reconstructing of CTO coronary artery with high accuracy and reliability is feasible.