Methods of aortic cross-sections construction and calculation of their characteristics from computed tomography images

This work is devoted to the development of methods for processing computed tomography (CT) images of the aorta in the context of automating the process of aneurysm diagnosis and dissection. This direction is extremely relevant because it allows to significantly facilitate the work of a cardiac surgeon in the diagnosis of thoracic aortic aneurysm and abdominal aortic aneurysm and, accordingly, to reduce the time required to make the correct diagnosis. In this article, methods are proposed to obtain aortic parameters (slice area, border length, and diameters) necessary for diagnosis from the original CT images. In particular, descriptions of the developed algorithms based on classical approaches of computer graphics are given. They are designed to construct a digital 3$D$-model of the aorta, its pathline, slices orthogonal to the pathline and measurements of aortic parameters from the slices. An experiment was conducted to test and evaluate the quality of the proposed methods (by 12 indicators) on a data set prepared by the specialists of the Pirogov Clinic of High Medical Technologies at Saint Petersburg State University. The experiment showed that the proposed methods have a rather high accuracy: the deviation of the results of the considered method from the expected expert results of a cardiac surgeon was about 6 % in measuring the border length, about 7 % in estimating the larger diameter, about 14 % in estimating the smaller diameter, and about 16 % in estimating the area.