Selected Readings in Vision and Graphics
edited by Luc Van Gool, Gábor Székely, Markus Gross, Bernt Schiele

Volume 54

Stefan Saur

Quantitative Assessment of Atherosclerosis in Coronary Arteries

2009. XVI, 150 pages. EUR 64,00. ISBN-10: 3-86628-281-8

ISBN-13: 978-3-86628-281-0

Cardiovascular diseases represent the leading cause of death in developed countries. In the presence of atherosclerosis, plaques develop by the accumulation of lipid or calcified deposits in the vessel walls. These days, computed tomography (CT) has emerged as a robust and accurate modality for the assessment of atherosclerosis. However, as automatic software tools are still missing, the assessment is done manually which induces errors in form of observer variabilities for the detection and measurement of plaques.

This book aims in reducing these aforementioned variabilities by presenting automatic

and semi-automatic algorithms for an improved assessment of atherosclerosis in coronary arteries.

Firstly, a robust method for the volumetric assessment of calcified plaques in non-enhanced CT data sets is presented. Then, a framework for the automatic extraction of calcified plaques is discussed which includes algorithms for the extraction of anatomical features. Afterwards, Dual Energy CT is considered to propose an algorithm for contrast enhancement between tissues as compared to a conventional CT examination. Finally, spatial plaque distribution patterns are evaluated. Knowledge about these patterns is used to propose a guided review of coronary segments for improving manual plaque detection.

About hte Author

Stefan Saur obtained his M.Sc. (Dipl.-Ing.) degree in Electrical Engineering and Information Technology from the University of Karlsruhe, Germany, in 2005. He performed his master thesis at Siemens Corporate Research in Princeton, New Jersey, USA in the field of medical imaging. From 2005 to 2009, he was research assistant and Ph.D. student at the Computer Vision Laboratory of ETH Zurich, Switzerland, with Prof. Gábor Székely. In 2009, he finished his doctoral thesis entitled “Quantitative Assessment of Atherosclerosis in Coronary Arteries” and was awarded a Ph.D. degree (Dr. sc. ETH Zürich) from ETH Zurich.

Keywords / Schlagwörter:
Cardiovascular diseases, atherosclerosis, computed tomography (CT), coronary arteries, calcified plaques

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