Rapid Morphological Measurement Method of Aortic Dissection Stent Based on Spatial Observation Point Set

Area of Science:

• Medical Imaging
• Biomedical Engineering
• Cardiovascular Surgery

Background:

• Accurate measurement of post-operative stent morphology in aortic dissection patients is crucial for diagnosis and prognosis.
• Current manual measurement methods are time-consuming, error-prone, and hinder data association analysis.
• A need exists for an automated, accurate, and efficient method for stent morphology assessment.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and validate an automated method for measuring stent morphology in aortic dissection patients.
• To improve the accuracy and efficiency of morphological parameter extraction compared to traditional manual methods.
• To enable rapid assessment of complex stent features, such as circumferential deflection angle.

Main Methods:

• 3D reconstruction of 109 CT scans from 26 patients using mimics software.
• Development of a fully automatic stent segmentation and observation point extraction algorithm.
• Validation on a test set of 8 cases (408 points), comparing automated measurements with manual ones.

Main Results:

• High agreement between automated and manual measurements for low-complexity parameters (e.g., stent end position, slip volume; r > 0.988).
• Automated method corrected medium-complexity parameter errors (e.g., support ring diameter) with an average of 1.38 mm (max 4 mm).
• Low error rate (2.2%) and high spatial accuracy (0.73 mm average distance) for automated observation point extraction.
• Successful measurement of complex parameters like circumferential deflection angle, not feasible with traditional methods.

Conclusions:

• The proposed automated method significantly reduces observation time and data processing costs.
• It offers rapid and accurate acquisition of morphological parameters, including complex ones.
• The approach facilitates quick adaptation for new parameter requirements via 'combinatorial functions' without data set modification.