Quantification of coronary artery Stenosis by Area Stenosis from cardiac CT angiography.

Non-invasive cardiac computed tomography angiography (CTA) is widely used to assess coronary artery stenosis and give clinical decision-making support to clinicians. The severity of stenosis lesion is commonly graded by a range of percent Diameter Stenosis (DS), which can introduce false positive diagnoses or over-estimation, triggering unnecessary further procedures. In this paper, a system and the associate methods to quantify stenosis by the percent Area Stenosis (AS) from cardiac CTA is presented. In the process, coronary artery tree is segmented and the centerline is extracted by Hessian filtering and the minimal path method. After a serial of 2D cross-sectional artery images along the artery centerline are obtained, lumen areas are segmented by ellipse-fitting with deformable models, and consequently to compute the lesion's AS. Experimental results on 5 CTA data sets show that compared to DS, AS better correlates to the reference standard for stenosis quantification, suggesting the efficacy of the proposed system.

THE OBSERVATION ON LEUKOCYTE COUNTS, CLASSIFICATION AND CYTOCHEMISTRY OF NEUTROPHIL GRANULOCYTE DURING TUBAL LIGATION UNDER ACUPUNCTURE ANESTHESIA / 解剖学报

The changes in the total and differential leukocyte counts as well as glycogen con- tent and alkaline phosphatase activity of neutrophile granulocyte of peripheral blood were studied during tubal ligation through abdomen with electro-acupuncture at Zha- guan point(tubal ligation point).This work may help to detect the role of the leuko- cytes in the regulatory function of the body and its relationship to acupuncture anal- gesia.The resuhs were as follows: 50 patients undergoing tubal ligation under acupuncture anesthesia were observed. During the operation,the total number of leukocytes was increased as compared with that before the operation.In patients of grade Ⅰefficacy(35 cases)the total number of leukocytes was increased most markedly.In all patients operated under acupuncture anesthesia,the relative proportion of various types of leukocytes showed little or no significant changes,but their absolute number increased to some extent,with the excep- tion of eosinophile granulocyte of grade Ⅱpatients which decreased slightly.A cyto- chemical study of the glycogen content of neutrophil was carried out in 45 patients during acupuncture anaesthesia.The content was decreased during operation especially in 31 cases of Grade Ⅰpatients it was decreased most markedly.On the other hand,the neutro- phil alkaline phosphatase activity was increased during the operation in 20 patients. The control group of 33 cases was further divided into three subgroups.In the first subgroup,we used acupuncture anaesthesia without operation and the total number of leukocytes was decreased slightly.In the second subgroup the patients were operated under local anesthesia(2% procain solution injection subcutaneously),and the last sub- group comprised only normal adults without any operation or anesthesia.There were little or no significant changes in total and differential leukocyte counts during the experiment in th last two subgroups. The above alterations of leukocyte observed in patients operated under acupuncture anesthesia may explain the enhancement of bodily protection produced by acupuncture, by the way of the regulation effect of central nervous system.