PhD Thesis Proposal Defence


"Segmentation Algorithms for Quantitative Analysis of Vascular
Abnormalities on Three Dimensional Angiography"

by

Mr. Chun Kit Wong


Abstract:

Cerebrovascular disease, in particular intracranial atherosclerotic
stenosis and cerebral aneurysm, is the common cause of stroke which
ranks the third place amongst all causes of death in many countries
and regions, including Hong Kong.  Understanding the geometry
characteristics of those lesions is an essential part of diagnosis and
element for endovascular treatment planning. In the clinical
environment, quantitation of the lesions is often conducted on 2-D
digital subtraction angiography (DSA), which may suffer from the
foreshortening effect due to the inappropriate X-ray projection angle
selection and the non-linear magnification caused by the perspective
projection.  The technological advances in 3-D medical imaging open up
new opportunities for the elucidation of the lesion characteristics.
This motivates us to develop two novel algorithms for the segmentation
of vessels and vascular lesions in 3-D angiography.

The first algorithm can be considered as a low-level segmentation
algorithm to produce angiographic segmentation for the second
algorithm to perform high-level segmentation of the atherosclerotic
plaque volume and aneurysm body from the diseased portion of the
arteries. Such approach enables later interactive or automatic
quantitative analyses on the pathological structures in an exclusive
manner.  In an in vivo study with nearly twenty angiograms, the
preliminary results show that our method can help increase the
measurement repeatability of the clinical parameters by more than ten
times. Therefore, we believe that the works presented can help
elucidate the lesion characteristics for diagnosis of the
cerebrovascular diseases and endovascular treatment planning. Lastly,
the limitations of the proposed approach and the direction of future
studies are discussed in this proposal.


Date:     		Thursday, 4 May 2006

Time:                   9:30a.m.-11:30a.m.

Venue:                  Room 3301
			lifts 17-18

Committee Members:      Dr. Albert Chung (Supervisor)
                        Dr. Chi-Keung Tang (Chairperson)
			Dr. Huamin Qu
			Dr. Pengcheng Shi (ELEC)


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