Automatic Assessment of Transcatheter Aortic Valve Implantation Results on Four-Dimensional Computed Tomography...

Transcatheter aortic valve implantation (TAVI) is a procedure to treat severe aortic stenosis. There are several clinical concerns related to potential complications after the procedure, which demand the analysis of computerized tomography (CT) scans after TAVI to assess the implant's result. This work introduces a novel, fully automatic method for the analysis of post-TAVI 4D-CT scans to characterize the prosthesis and its relationship with the patient's anatomy. The method enables measurement extraction, including prosthesis volume, center of mass, cross-sectional area (CSA) along the prosthesis axis, and CSA difference between the aortic root and prosthesis, all the variables studied throughout the cardiac cycle. The method has been implemented and evaluated with a cohort of 13 patients with five different prosthesis models, successfully extracting all the measurements from each patient in an automatic way. For Allegra patients, the mean of the obtained inner volume values ranged from 10,798.20 mm³ to 18,172.35 mm³, and CSA in the maximum diameter plane varied from 396.35 mm² to 485.34 mm². The implantation of this new method could provide information of the important clinical value that would contribute to the improvement of TAVI, significantly reducing the time and effort invested by clinicians in the image interpretation process.