Towards automatic quantification of the epicardial fat in non-contrasted CT images

• Type: Article in International Scientific Journal
• Date: 2011

Authors

Jorge Manuel Gomes Barbosa (Author) FEUP; Figueiredo, B (Author) Other; Bettencourt, N (Author) Other; João Manuel R. S. Tavares (Author) FEUP

Journal

Title: Computer Methods in Biomechanics and Biomedical Engineering

Vol. 14 No. 10

Pages: 905-914

ISSN: 1025-5842

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Indexing

ISI Web of Knowledge - 22 Citations

Scopus - 28 Citations

Other information

Authenticus ID: P-002-Y98

DOI: 10.1080/10255842.2010.499871

Abstract (EN): In this work, we present a technique to semi-automatically quantify the epicardial fat in non-contrasted computed tomography (CT) images. The epicardial fat is very close to the pericardial fat, being separated only by the pericardium that appears in the image as a very thin line, which is hard to detect. Therefore, an algorithm that uses the anatomy of the heart was developed to detect the pericardium line via control points of the line. From the points detected an interpolation was applied based on the cubic interpolation, which was also improved to avoid incorrect interpolation that occurs when the two variables are non-monotonic. The method is validated by using a set of 40 CT images of the heart of 40 human subjects. In 62.5% of the cases only minimal user intervention was required and the results compared favourably with the results obtained by the manual process.

Language: English

Type (Professor's evaluation): Scientific

No. of pages: 10