Automated Cardiac Resting Phase Detection Targeted on the Right Coronary Artery
This work addresses a domain-specific need in medical imaging for automating cardiac phase detection, which is incremental as it applies existing motion tracking methods to a new anatomical target.
The paper tackled the problem of automatically detecting the resting phase of the right coronary artery in cardiac imaging to reduce motion artifacts, achieving 92.7% accuracy, 90.5% sensitivity, and 95.0% specificity on a clinical dataset of 102 cases.
Static cardiac imaging such as late gadolinium enhancement, mapping, or 3-D coronary angiography require prior information, e.g., the phase during a cardiac cycle with least motion, called resting phase (RP). The purpose of this work is to propose a fully automated framework that allows the detection of the right coronary artery (RCA) RP within CINE series. The proposed prototype system consists of three main steps. First, the localization of the regions of interest (ROI) is performed. Second, the cropped ROI series are taken for tracking motions over all time points. Third, the output motion values are used to classify RPs. In this work, we focused on the detection of the area with the outer edge of the cross-section of the RCA as our target. The proposed framework was evaluated on 102 clinically acquired dataset at 1.5T and 3T. The automatically classified RPs were compared with the reference RPs annotated manually by a expert for testing the robustness and feasibility of the framework. The predicted RCA RPs showed high agreement with the experts annotated RPs with 92.7% accuracy, 90.5% sensitivity and 95.0% specificity for the unseen study dataset. The mean absolute difference of the start and end RP was 13.6 $\pm$ 18.6 ms for the validation study dataset (n=102). In this work, automated RP detection has been introduced by the proposed framework and demonstrated feasibility, robustness, and applicability for static imaging acquisitions.