Supporting the TECAB Grafting Through CT Based Analysis of Coronary Arteries

Calcified coronary arteries can cause severe cardiac problems and may provoke an infarction of the heart’s wall. An established treatment method is the bypass operation. The usage of a telemanipulation system allows for the execution of that operation as a totally endoscopic coronary artery bypass (TECAB) grafting. This relatively new method narrows the surgeon’s view and does not permit the palpation of the vessel in order to detect calcifications (hard plaques). A planning based on contrast enhanced, cardiac CT data sets can compensate for that problem. This work presents analysis methods for coronary arteries. Hard plaques are detected using a tracking-based vessel segmentation technique. In addition, the vessel’s neighborhood is analyzed in order to decide whether it is surrounded by tissue or fat, or if it is freely accessible for the surgeon’s instruments. Furthermore, well adapted methods for the visualization of these analysis results are presented.