Reduction of Visual Disruptions in Coronary Cine-Angiography for Better Diagnostic Viewing

Abstract

Coronary angiography is an invasive medical imaging modality which is widely used as a preliminary diagnostic method in Interventional Cardiology for detection of luminal obstructions in Coronary Arteries (CA). Noise, non-uniform illumination, low contrast and epicardial motion are considered as the reported visual degradations which are recorded automatically in Coronary angiography. Further, those factors form certain unpredictable obstructions during the angiography based disease diagnosis. In this study, it has been proposed a frequency filtering based frame enhancement method for surmounting those problems and improving the visual quality of the angiograms. The proposed method is based on homomorphic butter worth high pass filter and empirically validated contrast stretching technique. Further, the optical flow based frame stabilization method has been applied in the later stages of the proposed method for correcting the epicardial deformations. Study results clearly emphasized the visual improvement obtained from this method. The enhanced angiography frames produced in this study can be recommended for reliable stenosis detection. Further, these enhanced frames can be further used for quantitative stenosis assessment.