engleski

Segmentation of Phase-Contrast MR Images for Aortic Pulse Wave Velocity Measurements

Aortic stiffness is an important diagnostic and prognostic parameter for many diseases, and is estimated by measuring the Pulse Wave Velocity (PWV) from Cardiac Magnetic Resonance (CMR) images. However, this process requires combinations of multiple sequences, which makes the acquisition long and processing tedious. We propose a method for aorta segmentation and centerline extraction from para-sagittal Phase-Contrast (PC) CMR images. The method uses the order of appearance of the blood flow in PC images to track the aortic centerline from the seed start position to the seed end position of the aorta. The only required user interaction involves selection of 2 input seed points for the start and end position of the aorta. We validate our results against the ground truth manually extracted centerlines from para-sagittal PC images and anatomical MR images. The resulting measurement values of both centerline length and PWV show high accuracy and low variability, which allows for use in clinical setting. The main advantage of our method is that it requires only velocity encoded PC image, while being able to process images encoded only in one direction.

Image segmentation Cardiac MRI Pulse Wave Velocity

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