Validation of a robust method for quantification of three‐dimensional growth of the thoracic aorta using deformable image registration

作者：Zhangxing Bian, Jiayang Zhong, Jeffrey Dominic, Gary E. Christensen, Charles R. Hatt, Nicholas S. Burris · 发表于：Medical Physics · 年份：2022 · DOI：10.1002/mp.15496 · 被引用次数：24 · 研究领域：Aortic Disease and Treatment Approaches、Aortic aneurysm repair treatments、Connective tissue disorders research

Abstract Purpose Accurate assessment of thoracic aortic aneurysm (TAA) growth is important for appropriate clinical management. Maximal aortic diameter is the primary metric that is used to assess growth, but it suffers from substantial measurement variability. A recently proposed technique, termed vascular deformation mapping (VDM), is able to quantify three‐dimensional aortic growth using clinical computed tomography angiography (CTA) data using an approach based on deformable image registration (DIR). However, the accuracy and robustness of VDM remains undefined given the lack of ground truth from clinical CTA data, and, furthermore, the performance of VDM relative to standard manual diameter measurements is unknown. Methods To evaluate the performance of the VDM pipeline for quantifying aortic growth, we developed a novel and systematic evaluation process to generate 76 unique synthetic CTA growth phantoms (based on 10 unique cases) with variable degrees and locations of aortic wall deformation. Aortic deformation was quantified using two metrics: area ratio (AR), defined as the ratio of surface area in triangular mesh elements and the magnitude of deformation in the normal direction (DiN) relative to the aortic surface. Using these phantoms, we further investigated the effects on VDM's measurement accuracy resulting from factors that influence the quality of clinical CTA data such as respiratory translations, slice thickness, and image noise. Lastly, we compare the measu...