Fast Marching and Runge-Kutta Based Method for Centreline Extraction of Right Coronary Artery in Human Patients.

The CT angiography (CTA) is a clinically indicated test for the assessment of coronary luminal stenosis that requires centerline extractions. There is currently no centerline extraction algorithm that is automatic, real-time and very accurate. Therefore, we sought to (i) develop a hybrid approach by incorporating fast marching and Runge-Kutta based methods for the extraction of coronary artery centerlines from CTA; (ii) evaluate the accuracy of the present method compared to Van's method by using ground truth centerline as a reference; (iii) evaluate the coronary lumen area of our centerline method in comparison with the intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) as the standard of reference. The proposed method was found to be more computationally efficient, and performed better than the Van's method in terms of overlap measures (i.e., OV: [Formula: see text] vs. [Formula: see text]; OF: [Formula: see text] vs. [Formula: see text]; and OT: [Formula: see text] vs. [Formula: see text], all [Formula: see text]). In comparison with IVUS derived coronary lumen area, the proposed approach was more accurate than the Van's method. This hybrid approach by incorporating fast marching and Runge-Kutta based methods could offer fast and accurate extraction of centerline as well as the lumen area. This method may garner wider clinical potential as a real-time coronary stenosis assessment tool.