Coronary artery motion estimation using X-ray cineangiogram / 生物医学工程学杂志

ABSTRACT

This paper presents an approach for estimating the non-rigid motion of coronary arteries using digital angiographic images. Displacement vectors of vessel points are obtained by finding points correspondences in two successive frames. Smoothness of motion field and vessel deformation measurement are considered in matching, and unmatched regions are also dealt with in the fact that the vessel after deformation may have different size with its original station. The search strategy for optimal matching is carried out using dynamic programming (DP) so that computing cost is reduced. Results of this motion estimation method applied to synthetic and clinical images have shown that the method is accurate, with a root mean square error about one pixel for simulated data. For the case of actual X-ray coronary angiographic images, visual inspection of the detected pairs of points shows that the results are very encouraging.