Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item:
https://hdl.handle.net/10216/43636
Author(s): | Bruno Figueiredo Jorge G. Barbosa Nuno Bettencourt João Manuel R. S. Tavares |
Title: | Semi-automatic quantification of the epicardial fat in CT images |
Issue Date: | 2009 |
Abstract: | In this work we present a technique to automatically or semi-automatically quantify the epicardial fat in noncontrasted Computed Tomography (CT) images. In CT images, the epicardial fat is very close to the pericardial fat, distincted only by the pericardium. The pericardium appears in the image as a very thin line, very hard to discriminate. To enhance the pericardium line and to remove noise as well as higher intensities due to calcifications, some pre-processing was applied, namely region growing, thresholding and average filtering techniques. To detect the pericardium line an algorithm was developed that considerer the heart anatomy to find control points belonging to that line. From the points detected an interpolation was done based on the cubic spline method. This method was also improved to avoid incorrect interpolation that occurs when one of the coordinates of the points is repeated. After having the line delineation, the pixels bellow the line were counted, considering only the pixels in the fat window (-190 to -30 Hounsfiel Units). In 10 images tested, in 4 the system fully automatically returned the correct value for epicardial fat. In the other 6 the system needed a small correction by moving 1 or 2 points to return the correct value of epicardial fat. The values of the automatic quantification were compared to the values obtained by the manual process, having 10% as maximum error allowed. We concluded that this method is able to, automatically or with a small interaction, return the value of the epicardial fat, for the non contrast CT images tested. |
Subject: | Engenharia biomédica, Outras ciências da engenharia e tecnologias Biomedical enginnering, Other engineering and technologies |
Scientific areas: | Ciências da engenharia e tecnologias::Outras ciências da engenharia e tecnologias Engineering and technology::Other engineering and technologies |
URI: | https://hdl.handle.net/10216/43636 |
Source: | VipIMAGE 2009 - II ECCOMAS Thematic Conference on Computational Vision and Medical Image Processing |
Document Type: | Artigo em Livro de Atas de Conferência Internacional |
Rights: | openAccess |
License: | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ |
Appears in Collections: | FEUP - Artigo em Livro de Atas de Conferência Internacional |
This item is licensed under a Creative Commons License