3-DIMENSIONAL DENSITOMETRIC QUANTIFICATION OF ARTERIAL STENOSES

The quantification of coronary artery stenoses in angiographic images plays a dominant role in interventional cardiology. Unfortunately, the geometric methods used to this purpose are not accurate. To overcome their limitations, several densitometric techniques have been develope d. They assume, however, that the X-rays are perpendicular to the vess el axis in space, and that the relationship between local thickness of contrast medium in the vessel and resulting ''densitometric signal'' is linear. Since these two conditions are seldom fulfilled, we have de veloped an improved densitometric method featuring a combined correcti on for these two types of error contributions.