Reconstruction of Coronary Artery Centrelines from X-Ray Angiography Using a Mixture of Student’s t-Distributions
Serkan Çimen, Ali Gooya, Nishant Ravikumar, Zeike A. Taylor, Alejandro Federico Frangi · Lecture notes in computer science · 2016
Three-dimensional reconstructions of coronary arteries can overcome some of the limitations of 2D X-ray angiography, namely artery overlap/foreshortening and lack of depth information. Model-based arterial reconstruction algorithms usually rely on 2D coronary artery segmentations and require good robustness to outliers. In this paper, we propose a novel probabilistic method to reconstruct coronary artery centrelines from retrospectively gated X-ray images based on a probabilistic mixture model. Specifically, 3D coronary artery centrelines are described by a mixture of Student’s t-distributions, and the reconstruction is formulated as maximum-likelihood estimation of the mixture model parameters, given the 2D segmentations of arteries from 2D X-ray images. Our method provides robustness against the erroneously segmented parts in the 2D segmentations by taking advantage of the inherent robustness of t-distributions. We validate our reconstruction results using synthetic phantom and clinical X-ray angiography data. The results show that the proposed method can cope with imperfect and noisy segmentation data.