Extraction of the Best Frames in Coronary Angiograms for Diagnosis and Analysis

X-ray coronary angiography has been a gold standard in the clinical diagnosis and interventional treatment of coronary arterial diseases for decades. In angiography, a sequence of images is obtained, a few of which are suitable for physician inspection. This paper proposes an automatic algorithm for the extraction of one or more frames from an angiogram sequence, which is most suitable for diagnosis and analysis by experts or processors. The algorithm consists of two stages: In the first stage, the background and illumination in the angiogram sequence are omitted. By analyzing the histogram of the sequence, a feature is attributed to each frame. These features, determining the visibility of the vessel tree, are clustered by a fuzzy c-means method. In the second stage, the cardiac phase for each frame is specified. Using the results of both stages, the best frames in an angiogram sequence are obtained. To evaluate the proposed method, it has been tested on angiogram sequences from several patients. The results demonstrate the accuracy of the method. The performance and speed of our method indicate its usefulness in clinical applications.