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| Author(s): |
Danilo Meneses Lage
Total Authors: 1
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| Document type: | Doctoral Thesis |
| Press: | São Paulo. |
| Institution: | Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Faculdade de Medicina (FM/SBD) |
| Defense date: | 2010-10-01 |
| Examining board members: |
Sergio Shiguemi Furuie;
Hae Yong Kim;
Roseli de Deus Lopes;
Nelson Delfino D'Ávila Mascarenhas;
Jeane Mike Tsutsui
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| Advisor: | Sergio Shiguemi Furuie; Jeane Mike Tsutsui |
| Abstract | |
With the technological advances of recent decades, echocardiography has emerged as a relatively low cost imaging diagnostic alternative, that does not use ionizing or radioactive energy. Lately, the advent of microbubble-based contrast agents and array transducers turned possible the visualization of three-dimensional coronary arteries anatomy. The present project proposes to evaluate segmentation methods able to deal with the visualization of the epicardial coronary arteries in microbubble-based three-dimensional echocardiography images. This is the first step towards the development of effective and efficient computational tools for diagnosis and prognosis assistance of cardiac pacient. We propose a methodology to facilitate the access to epicardial coronary arteries in tridimensional echocardiographic images. Among the studied approaches, Fuzzy Connectednessbased segmentation methods were identified as being the most promising. We studied six approaches based on this theory, three of them are described in the literature (Generalized FC GFC; Relative FC RFC; Dynamic Weighted FC DyWFC) and three original contributions (Area of Search FC ASFC; Ultrasound-k FC USFC; Guided FC GuFC). To evaluate the accuracy of these algorithms, a set composed of 360 simulated images were created. We also selected a set of 10 real images, composed of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy patients. For simulated images set, the methods of literature achieved accuracy of 85.5% for GFC, 89,5% for RFC and 92,0% for DyWFC, meanwhile, the proposed method achieved accuracy of 88.9% for ASFC, 91,7 % for USkFC and 95,2% for GuFC. Using the real images set, the methods converged to good results for clinical purposes. These results demonstrate that the proposed method GuFC has shown a better performance than the others, becoming a candidate to the segmentation step in a computational tool for coronary arteries visualization in the future (AU) | |
| FAPESP's process: | 06/01424-5 - Visualization of epicardial coronary arteries from three-dimensional echocardiographic images with microbubble contrast application |
| Grantee: | Danilo Meneses Lage |
| Support Opportunities: | Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate (Direct) |