The present disclosure relates to the technical field of medical imaging, and a method and a system of calculating a cross-section area and an included angle of a three-dimensional blood vessel branch.
Coronary heart disease is one of the most important causes of deaths of diseases worldwide, and it is of more important significance to strengthen monitoring and treatment of coronary heart disease with the accelerated trend of social aging. A main cause of coronary heart disease is insufficient blood supply to heart due to stenosis or obstruction of coronary artery blood vessels, therefore, quantification of blood supply capacity of coronary artery blood vessels is required. Branch in a stenotic area of blood vessel is an important factor affecting coronary blood flow rate. The coronary angiography imaging commonly used in clinic at present can display the degree of stenosis of blood vessel, but cannot realize accurate identification of three-dimensional shape of the branch due to projection imaging and low imaging resolution thereof.
Intravenous Ultrasound (IVUS) is a technique in which a catheter is used to guide a high-frequency micro-ultrasound probe into a vascular cavity for imaging, and after rotational scanning in the vascular cavity, fine anatomical information of vascular tissue structure and geometry is displayed by an electronic imaging system. Intravascular optical coherence tomography (OCT) is an intravascular tomographic imaging method rapidly developed in recent years, which, by using light interference, converts detected reflective or scattered signals of biological tissues into electrical signals and reconstructs a biological tissue structure image. Both IVUS and OCT imaging have high spatial resolution, and can accurately identify blood vessel information in the image as well as branch blood vessels extending from the main blood vessel. In the above, IVUS has strong penetrating power and OCT has better resolution, therefore, an integrated image of both IVUS and OCT can render more comprehensive branch geometric information.
At present, researches on branch geometric information based on intravascular imaging mainly focus on automatic identification of branch shape in a two-dimensional image, but quantitative measurement of the branch geometric information for both vascular structure and functional evaluation depends on accurate quantification and reconstruction of branch in the three-dimensional space. For example, the gold standard for evaluating coronary stenosis, that is, fractional flow reservation (FFR) of coronary artery, is affected by the cross-section area of lumen branch in the three-dimensional space. A stent is usually implanted in clinic for radially supporting blocked blood vessel, thus relieving stenosis and restoring coronary artery blood flow. Herein, for implanting stent into a connecting portion of main blood vessel and the branch, it is necessary to directionally locate an included angle of the branch relative to the main blood vessel in the three-dimensional space, so as to realize accurate implantation, and prevent stent malapposition, vessel re-occlusion, and stent thrombosis. In particular, realizing accurate identification and quantification of branch in a two-dimensional image is not equivalent to being capable of obtaining the accurate information of the blood vessel branch in the three-dimensional space, because the three-dimensional space requires additional information such as the angle of the branch relative to the main blood vessel; therefore, it is relatively difficult to automatically, rapidly, and accurately measure the cross-section area of a three-dimensional branch.
It should be noted that the information disclosed in the above part of Background Art is only for enhancement of understanding of the background of the present disclosure, and therefore may include information that does not constitute prior art already known to a person ordinarily skilled in the art.
The present disclosure, aiming at overcoming the defects of the prior art, provides a method and a system of calculating a cross-section area and an included angle of a three-dimensional blood vessel branch, which solves the problem that the prior art does not support the geometrical quantitative measurement of side branch in the three-dimensional space, and cannot automatically, quickly, and accurately measure the real cross-section area and an included angle of a three-dimensional blood vessel branch.
The objective of the present disclosure is achieved by the following technical solutions: a method of calculating the cross-section area and an included angle of a three-dimensional blood vessel branch, wherein the calculating method includes steps of:
In step S1, the step of automatically detecting the contours of a main blood vessel and a branch blood vessel according to intravascular imaging data, and determining connecting points of the main blood vessel and the branch blood vessel includes:
In step S2, the step of determining a three-dimensional branch outer contour includes:
In step S2, the step of determining an initial normal vector of a branch section includes:
In step S3, the step of translating a branch section to the branch connecting part, and determining a position thereof at the branch connecting part and an intersecting cross-section of the branch section and the branch outer contour includes:
After obtaining the plurality of branch cross-section contours, screening the plurality of branch cross-section contours according to branch cross-section screening conditions so as to obtain valid branch cross-section contours; and the branch cross-section screening conditions include:
In step S4, the step of rotating a three-dimensional branch cross-section contour to obtain an equivalent two-dimensional branch cross-section contour includes:
In step S4, the step of calculating an area of the two-dimensional branch cross-section contour includes:
A rotating manner of rotating the initial normal vector of the branch section in step S5 includes rotating by changing the angle in equal proportions or rotating by changing the angle in a sparse-to-dense manner, wherein the intravascular imaging data includes intravascular optical coherence tomography data and intravascular ultrasound data.
A system of calculating a cross-section area and an included angle of a three-dimensional blood vessel branch, wherein it includes an image acquisition module, a blood vessel branch calculation module, a post-processing module, and a display module;
The present disclosure has the following advantages: the method and the system of calculating a cross-section area and an included angle of a three-dimensional blood vessel branch not only can determine the contours of the main blood vessel and the branch blood vessel in the two-dimensional space, but can also perform three-dimensional branch modeling and accurate quantification thereof, further analyze and calculate to obtain the cross-section area of the branch blood vessel in the three-dimensional space and its included angle with the main blood vessel; and it can guide subsequent quantitative evaluation of vascular morphology and function, for example, FFR calculation, which requires an accurate quantification of the cross-section area of a branch blood vessel in the three-dimensional space to calculate shunt. When implanting a stent in clinic at the connecting part of the main blood vessel and the branch blood vessel, an accurate included angle of the branch blood vessel relative to the main blood vessel in the three-dimensional space is required for directional positioning. The present disclosure promotes the development of three-dimensional quantification technology of vascular branches.
In order to make the objectives, technical solutions, and advantages of the embodiments of the present disclosure more clear, the technical solutions in the embodiments of the present disclosure will be described below clearly and completely with reference to the drawings in the embodiments of the present disclosure. It is apparent that the embodiments described are some, but not all of the embodiments of the present disclosure. Generally, components in the embodiments of the present disclosure described and shown in the drawings herein may be arranged and designed in various different configurations. Therefore, the detailed description below of the embodiments of the present disclosure provided in the drawings is not intended to limit the scope of the present disclosure claimed, but merely illustrates chosen embodiments of the present disclosure. All of other embodiments obtained by a person skilled in the art based on the embodiments of the present disclosure without using any creative efforts shall fall within the scope of protection of the present disclosure. The present disclosure is further described below with reference to the drawings.
An embodiment of the present disclosure relates to a method of automatically identifying a branch blood vessel and calculating a three-dimensional cross-section area thereof and an included angle between the branch blood vessel and the main blood vessel. The technical problems mainly solved are detecting and obtaining the branch contour through intravascular image data, and calculating a cross-section area of the blood vessel branch and the included angle between the branch blood vessel and the main blood vessel in the three-dimensional space, so as to guide subsequent quantitative evaluation of vascular morphology and function, for example, FFR calculation and stent implantation across the side branch. The present disclosure can not only extract a two-dimensional branch contour and a position thereof, but also perform three-dimensional branch modeling on this basis, and further analyze and calculate to obtain the cross-section area of the branch blood vessel relative to the main blood vessel in the three-dimensional space and relevant three-dimensional contour and included angle thereof, wherein contents specifically included are as follows:
A flowchart of calculating and obtaining the above data is shown in
Step one, automatically detecting the contours of the main blood vessel and the branch blood vessel according to intravascular imaging data.
Sequential two-dimensional original images in vascular cavity of a patient are obtained using an intravascular imaging system, and sequential stacking of various frames thereof can reflect the anatomical information about the blood vessel of the patient in the three-dimensional space. The three-dimensional space takes positive directions of width and height of each frame of image as positive directions of x axis and y axis, and a stacking direction of the sequentially acquired frames is taken as a positive direction of z axis. Since intravascular imaging is typically based on a pull-back system, a positive direction of blood flow in the main blood vessel is a negative direction of z axis. Based on the large amount of data obtained by the intravascular imaging system, an artificial intelligence algorithm is used for automatically detecting blood vessel and branch contours.
Specifically, a convolutional neural network is selected for algorithm implementation. An encoder and a parallel partial decoder are employed to acquire high-level semantic information in the blood vessel image. A channel-wise feature pyramid module is adopted to acquire contextual information from high-level features. An reverse attention module is employed, to erase foreground information by reverse attention so as to identify a specific tissue region, and obtain structural details of vessel segmentation boundary.
It is judged whether the current frame has a branch or not, wherein a main blood vessel segmentation result is directly output for the frame without a branch, and branch analysis is not performed. When it is judged that a branch exists, segmentation results of a main blood vessel and a branch blood vessel are respectively output, as shown in
Step two, determining the connecting points of the main blood vessel and the branch blood vessel.
As shown in
Step three, determining a three-dimensional branch outer contour.
As shown in
Restricted by the pull-back parameters of the intravascular imaging system, the total number of frames of a branch part is usually sparse and the contours of the side branch in the adjacent frames may change abruptly, and virtual frames may be inserted between the real frames to smooth the contours, so as to buffer the amplitude of the sudden change. m virtual frames are inserted between each frame, and each virtual frame branch contour LVir is synthesized by combining the real branch contour LOut in the adjacent frames with different influence factors, respectively, wherein the influence factors, changing along with positions of the virtual frames, may linearly change or nonlinearly change. A total branch outer contour after inserting the virtual contours is denoted as LNew, as shown in
Step four, determining an initial normal vector of a branch section.
As shown in
Step five, determining a position of the above section translated to the branch connecting part.
As shown in
Step six, determining an intersecting cross section of the above section and the branch outer contour.
The branch outer contour LNew consists of r real frames and m virtual frames inserted between each frame, the section SF intersects each frame of the branch outer contour LNew at two points in the three-dimensional space, and all the above intersecting points are sequentially arranged counterclockwise to obtain a point set C3d={c1, c2, . . . ch}, which is a branch cross-section contour. As shown in
However, the direction and position of the section SF determine the intersection situation with each frame of LNew, and not all sections SF can have two intersecting points with each frame of LNew. If frames are arranged along the positive direction of z axis and the direction of blood flow is along the negative direction of z axis, an effective branch cross-section contour necessarily satisfies that the sections SF and LNew have two intersecting points at the first frame, then SF and LNew have two intersecting points in continuous a frames, where a≥2, and the last frame of the continuous a frames may have only one intersecting point. If frame a is not the last frame of this branch segment, LNew does not intersect the section SF at any frames after frame a+1. There are many cases of the branch cross-section contours that do not satisfy the above valid conditions, all of which are considered as invalid contours and need to be excluded.
Step seven, rotating a three-dimensional branch cross-section contour to obtain an equivalent two-dimensional contour.
An area is further calculated after valid contour condition is satisfied, wherein the calculation in the three-dimensional space has high computational complexity, therefore, the three-dimensional cross-section contour can be rotated to a two-dimensional plane to obtain an equivalent two-dimensional contour thereof, and then the area is calculated. As shown in
Step eight, calculating the area of the above two-dimensional branch cross-section contour.
As shown in
Height h of the arc is linearly or non-linearly related to the actual frame interval H between each frame and current cross-section angle. Simply, only taking frame interval H into account, the height h can be determined as h=H/2. The area of an enclosed contour formed by CArc is calculated using Green formula, i.e. denoted as branch cross-section contour area SNow.
Step nine, rotating the normal vector of the branch section, and repeating step five to step eight, so as to obtain a series of branch cross-section areas and normal vectors corresponding thereto. When rotating the branch section, the angles can be changed respectively in equal proportions in various directions in the three-dimensional space for rotation, or the angles can be changed in a sparse-to-dense manner, thus saving computational resources.
Step ten, selecting a minimum cross-section area sMin therein as the cross-section area of this segment of branch blood vessel, and taking an included angle β between the normal vector of the section and z axis as an included angle between the branch blood vessel and the main blood vessel.
Another embodiment of the present disclosure relates to a system for calculating a cross-section area of a blood vessel branch in the three-dimensional space and an included angle between a branch blood vessel and a main blood vessel based on intravascular imaging information, wherein the system includes an image acquisition module, a blood vessel branch calculation module, a post-processing module, and a display module; the image acquisition module is configured to acquire OCT images or IVUS images, or to acquire both the OCT and IVUS images, of the target blood vessel;
The above-mentioned are merely preferred embodiments of the present disclosure, and it should be understood that the present disclosure is not restricted to the form disclosed herein, and should not be regarded as excluding other embodiments, but may be used in various other combinations, modifications, and environments. In addition, the present disclosure can be altered through the above descriptions or technologies or knowledge in related fields within a scope of concept described herein. All alterations and changes made by a person in the art, without departing from the spirit and scope of the present disclosure, should be within the scope of protection of the claims attached to the present disclosure.
Number | Date | Country | Kind |
---|---|---|---|
2022110213780 | Aug 2022 | CN | national |