Atherosclerotic calcification of coronary artery detected by electron beam CT: A new probation of calcific algorithm / 生物医学工程学杂志

ABSTRACT

Electron beam computed tomography (EBCT) can detect the atherosclerotic calcification of coronary artery qualitatively and quantitatively. It was also verified that the atherosclerotic calcification was directly related to the atherosclerotic extent and had a limited relation to the occurrence of coronary heart disease (CHD). So EBCT is one of the good non-invasive methods for predicting the risk of CHD. However, there are some problems in the calcification parameters (calcification area, calcification score) adopted by EBCT which have high variability and low reproducibility. As a result, these parameters have imperfection and need to be improved further. This research provides a new calcification parameter (calcification volume) which makes the use of three dimensional information of all calcific pixels in EBCT scanning images of coronary artery. After experiment in 11 human coronary artery specimens, it was testified that calcification volume had a lower variability than calcification area and calcification score in 25% percentile, median, 75% percentile, Mean, respectively. P value of t test in Mean variability is 0.027, and 0.058. These results suggest that calcification volume may be a new calcification parameter.