Quantitative Image Analysis in Cardiac CT Angiography

Despite advances in diagnosis, treatment and interventions, cardiovascular disease remains a major health problem in the western world. Owing to the ageing society and changing lifestyle, cardiovascular disease affects an increasing number of individuals. Often, there are no symptoms prior to clinical cardiovascular disease related events such as myocardial infarction (heart attack), and irreversible damage or death may occur prior to any medical intervention. Advances in imaging technology have great potential to improve the management of cardiovascular disease through early detection, improved diagnosis and treatment monitoring [30]. This requires not only advanced techniques to image cardiovascular anatomy and function, but also robust methods to extract relevant (quantitative) parameters from these imaging data and novel techniques that effectively visualize diagnostically relevant image information. This thesis describes the development and validation of quantitative image analysis and visualization methods, which are essential steps towards improved imagebased diagnosis and prognosis of cardiovascular disease. In the subsequent sections we will introduce the cardiac anatomy, coronary artery disease, CT angiography (CTA) imaging of the coronary arteries, and methods for quantitative CTA image analysis. Following the introduction, we will provide an outline of this thesis in Section 1.2.