Coronary arteriography is very essential for evaluating the state of the coronary arteries. It is used to assess the need for bypass surgery and angioplasty. It is also used subsequently for evaluating the success of these procedures on patients. A commercially viable system, called CARDIAC ASSIST, will be developed to provide the image processing, analysis and planning support for the health- care provider in real time. The system will be developed based on three major tasks. 1) The development and parallelization of Coronary Arteriography and Analysis Reconstruction Software (CARS) to provide fast automatic recognition and tracking utilizing artificial intelligence techniques. 2) The use of ongoing research and development results to use more than two x-ray views for three-dimensional vascular bed reconstruction. An accurate measure of the vessel area of cross-section will be calculated from at least three views of x-ray data. 3) Finally, CARS will be integrated with a patient database. The knowledge-based integration techniques used will provide intelligent assistance to the health-care provider for the entire patient care process. Thus, new super- computing and software development technology will be incorporated into a low-cost personal computer or workstation.
| Dufresne, T E; Sarwal, A; Dhawan, A P (1994) A gray-level thinning method for delineation and representation of arteries. Comput Med Imaging Graph 18:343-55 |
