Watertight modeling and segmentation of bifurcated Coronary arteries for blood flow simulation using CT imaging

Image-based simulation of blood flow using computational fluid dynamics has been shown to play an important role in the diagnosis of ischemic coronary artery disease. Accurate extraction of complex coronary artery structures in a watertight geometry is a prerequisite, but manual segmentation is both tedious and subjective. Several semi- and fully automated coronary artery extraction approaches have been developed but have faced several challenges. Conventional voxel-based methods allow for watertight segmentation but are slow and difficult to incorporate expert knowledge. Machine learning based methods are relatively fast and capture rich information embedded in manual annotations. Although sufficient for visualization and analysis of coronary anatomy, these methods cannot be used directly for blood flow simulation if the coronary vasculature is represented as a loose combination of tubular structures and the bifurcation geometry is improperly modeled. In this paper, we propose a novel method to extract branching coronary arteries from CT imaging with a focus on explicit bifurcation modeling and application of machine learning. A bifurcation lumen is firstly modeled by generating the convex hull to join tubular vessel branches. Guided by the pre-determined centerline, machine learning based segmentation is performed to adapt the bifurcation lumen model to target vessel boundaries and smoothed by subdivision surfaces. Our experiments show the constructed coronary artery geometry from CT imaging is accurate by comparing results against the manually annotated ground-truths, and can be directly applied to coronary blood flow simulation.