Automated aortic supravalvular sinus detection in conventional computed tomography image

Valvular diseases are those where one or more of the cardiac valves are affected. Treatment of valvular diseases often involves replacement or restoration of the affected valve(s). In such a surgical procedure, the medical expert performing the procedure can largely benefit from a patient-specific and dynamic valvular model containing information complementary to the 2D/3D static images. To this end, in this study a novel automated supravalvular sinus detection method (to be used as a first step in aortic valve segmentation) on conventional contrast-enhanced ECG-gated multislice CT data and its evaluation on expert annotated 31 real cases are presented. Results demonstrate a highly accurate detection performance with average error rate inferior to 1.12 mm.