Med Biol Eng Comput

DOI 10.1007/s11517-014-1165-7

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Automatic segmentation of the aortic root in CT angiography

of candidate patients for transcatheter aortic valve implantation
M. A. Elattar • E. M. Wiegerinck • R. N. Planken •

E. vanbavel • H. C. van Assen • J. Baan Jr. •

H. A. Marquering

Received: 6 December 2013 / Accepted: 23 May 2014

Ó International Federation for Medical and Biological Engineering 2014

Abstract Transcatheter aortic valve implantation is a mean radial absolute error was 0.74 ± 0.39 mm, where the
minimal-invasive intervention for implanting prosthetic interobserver Dice coefficient was 0.95 ± 0.03 and the
valves in patients with aortic stenosis. Accurate automated mean error was 0.68 ± 0.34 mm. The proposed algo-
sizing for planning and patient selection is expected to rithm showed accurate results compared to manual
reduce adverse effects such as paravalvular leakage and segmentations.
stroke. Segmentation of the aortic root in CTA is pivotal to
enable automated sizing and planning. We present a fully Keywords Aortic root  Medical image segmentation 
automated segmentation algorithm to extract the aortic root Normalized cut  TAVI  CTA
from CTA volumes consisting of a number of steps: first,
the volume of interest is automatically detected, and the
centerline through the ascending aorta and aortic root 1 Introduction
centerline are determined. Subsequently, high intensities
due to calcifications are masked. Next, the aortic root is Aortic stenosis is the most common heart valve disease.
represented in cylindrical coordinates. Finally, the aortic Approximately one-third of all patients with severe
root is segmented using 3D normalized cuts. The method symptomatic aortic stenosis are not eligible for surgery,
was validated against manual delineations by calculating mainly because of high age, left ventricular dysfunction, or
Dice coefficients and average distance error in 20 patients. other co-morbidities [11]. Transcatheter aortic valve
The method successfully segmented the aortic root in all 20 implantation (TAVI) has been introduced as an alternative
cases. The mean Dice coefficient was 0.95 ± 0.03, and the treatment for these high-risk patients. TAVI provides sus-
tained clinical and hemodynamic benefits in selected high-
risk patients declined for conventional aortic valve
M. A. Elattar (&)  E. vanbavel  H. A. Marquering
Department of Biomedical Engineering and Physics, Academic replacement [17, 20]. However, TAVI is associated with a
Medical Center, University of Amsterdam, Meibergdreef 9, number of adverse effects, such as paravalvular leakage,
1105 AZ Amsterdam, The Netherlands stroke coronary obstruction, and conduction disorders [2, 9,
e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]
14]. The prevalence of these adverse effects may be
E. M. Wiegerinck  J. Baan Jr. reduced with improved patient selection, intervention
Department of Cardiology, Academic Medical Center, planning, and aortic sizing with the assistance of imaging
University of Amsterdam, 1105 AZ Amsterdam, and image analysis.
The Netherlands
Engineering solutions may help reducing the peri-pro-
R. N. Planken  H. A. Marquering cedural outcomes and detecting them postprocedurally for
Department of Radiology, Academic Medical Center, University better procedure extension decisions [1, 4, 15].
of Amsterdam, 1105 AZ Amsterdam, The Netherlands Automated image analysis may enable improved sizing,
preoperative planning, and alignment of preoperative CT
H. C. van Assen
Department of Electrical Engineering, Eindhoven University of data with intra-operative imaging, providing additional 3D
Technology, 5600 MB Eindhoven, The Netherlands information during the procedure. Therefore, segmentation

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of the aortic root and extraction of landmarks have the

potential to improve sizing and standardized planning.
A large number of studies have focused on artery seg-
mentation, including the aortic segmentation in particular
[6, 10, 12]. Four studies presented methods for the seg-
mentation of the aortic root in CT-based volumes. Zheng
et al. [21] introduced a fully automatic segmentation of the
aortic root in peri-procedural planning C-arm images using
marginal space learning. Lavi et al. [13] proposed a 2D
watershed-based algorithm to detect the aortic root in CT
axial images. This proposed technique was semiautomatic
and showed inadequate accuracy in low-quality volumes.
In [19], all heart chambers and the aortic structure were
extracted in CTA images using a model-based segmenta-
tion technique. Also, Grbic et al. [8] proposed the usage of
a new constrained multi-linear shape model conditioned by
anatomical measurements to segment the heart valves in
4D Cardiac CT. The studies [10, 12, 13] did not address the
effect of calcifications, which are quite common in our
patient population, on their performance. None of the
prementioned studies compared their accuracy with inter-
observer variation, which may be an important constraint
for introduction in clinical practice.
In this study, our goal was to introduce and evaluate a Fig. 1 Schematic overview of the proposed algorithm
relative straightforward, stable, and accurate image-pro-
cessing pipeline to detect and segment the aortic root in 3D
CTA images. In this paper, we introduce an algorithm to image data training set of 10 consecutive patients. The
detect the aortic root using thresholding, morphological accuracy of the presented method was tested using a test set
operations, and fuzzy classification. In the aortic root, the of 20 different consecutive patients. We developed the
centerline was determined, which was used to represent the proposed algorithm in MATLAB 2012a, and the developed
volume of interest in cylindrical coordinates. In this vol- code was run on an Intel Core i7 microprocessor.
ume, the segmentation was performed using a 3D nor-
malized cut method. We evaluated our proposed technique 2.2 Aortic root localization and centerline estimation
by comparing the automated segmentation with expert
manual delineations for 20 cases using radial variations and The proposed image-processing pipeline consists of eight
Dice metric. steps, as schematically depicted in Fig. 1. First, the posi-
tion of the aortic root and ascending aorta is estimated. In
these detected volumes, centerline is generated to resample
2 Methods the volume in cylindrical coordinates. The contours of the
aortic root were detected based on thresholding, morpho-
2.1 Data selection and experiment settings logical operators, connected component analysis, and fuzzy
classification.
Patients in our institute get standard CTA before TAVI as a We subsampled the volume fourfold in each dimension
preoperative imaging for manual sizing and planning. The to reduce computation time. The subsampled volume was
Institutional Review Board granted approval of the study smoothed using a 3D Gaussian filter with kernel size of
design and waived informed consent. Each dataset included approximately 5*5*10 mm and standard deviation of
approximately 500 slices covering the thorax and part of approximately 1 mm to reduce the noise level. Because the
the abdomen with an average slice thickness of 0.9 mm. filtering over a relative large volume was performed on the
Each slice had a size of 512*512 pixels spaced with an subsampled image, this procedure was fast. We thresholded
average width 0.39 mm. We selected the acquired volume the images at 225 HU to identify structures with contrast-
at 75 % (diastole) of the cardiac cycle to ensure that the enhanced blood-like intensities. The resulting segmentation
aortic valve was closed and movement artifacts were was consequently eroded to remove connectivity between
minimal. The method was adjusted and optimized using an neighboring artery structures. Connected component

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analysis based on 6-voxel connectivity was used to identify

separated objects.
Our image data collection contained image data of
patients with and without an aortic arch. These two situa-
tions resulted in very different characteristics of the con-
nected component representing the aortic root, which
complicated the ascending aorta selection. Therefore, we
first differentiated CTA image data with and without the
presence of an aortic arch to choose between the two
functions calculating the maximum likelihood in the fuzzy
classification technique.
Volumes with two large connected components in the
upper part of the volume were classified as a volume
without aortic arch, and volumes with a single connected
component as a volume with aortic arch. In case of two
connected components in the upper part of the volume, it
was assumed that these two large connected components
represent the ascending and descending aorta. A single
large connected component in the upper part of the volume
was considered to represent the aortic arch.
First, we needed to select the connected component that
represented the ascending aorta. For this goal, we used fuzzy Fig. 2 (Top) Schematic drawing for the aortic valve showing the
classification, which is a straightforward technique to group centerline and the planes of specific image reconstruction in red and
sets of elements in one cluster. It is based on the calculation black dashed line, respectively, (Left) 3D aortic root and three colored
of the affinity of each element toward each suspected group axes showing the sampling dimensions, the radial direction (red
arrow), angular direction (green circles), and the root axis (blue axis).
by calculating the likelihood of this element. (Right) The same aortic root represented in 3D cylindrical coordinates
Based on the presence of the aortic arch, we choose one
of the two different cost functions with different weights to 2.3 Preprocessing
calculate the likelihood Jobject of each structure to be the
ascending aorta. We included seven features ti in the cost Using the aortic root centerline, the aortic root was repre-
function: (1) center of mass; (2) the most superior position; sented in cylindrical coordinates, resulting in three new
(3) ratio of the principal components of the axial projection; dimensions: radius r, angle h, and length along the root
(4) Object size in mm3; (5) anterior-posterior range; (6) centerlines (Fig. 2). Reformatting was performed using
height; and (7) range in caudal-cranial direction. These nearest-neighbor interpolation. To cover the whole diam-
features were regulated by distinct weights xi and exponents eter of the aortic root, which ranges between 20 and 40 mm
qi. The values of the weights and exponents were estimated [7], we sampled a radius of 30 mm with 100 steps. The
by examining ten different testing patient datasets. angle was sampled with 64 points, and the aortic root
X
7 centerline was sampled with 100 samples with a step size
q
Jobject ¼ xi ti i ð1Þ of approximately 0.43 mm.
i¼1 To reduce artifacts due to the blooming effect of calci-
In case of connected components that included the aortic fications, high-intensity voxels were adjusted by assigning
arch and descending aorta, we needed to separate the contrast-enhanced blood-like intensities of 225 HU.
ascending aorta and aortic root from the remaining aorta To reduce the noise, a 3D Gaussian filtering was per-
structure. To achieve this goal, we calculated the area of the formed with a standard deviation of 0.63 mm in the z- and
aorta in each slice. We aligned a predefined reference curve r-direction and of 8.44° along theta. The filter size was
defining the start and the end of the ascending aorta. Using 3 mm 9 3 mm 9 25°.
the predefined reference curve, the slice position to separate
the ascending aorta was defined. Using the segmented 2.4 Normalized cut segmentation
ascending aorta, we calculated its centerline and extended it
in the direction of the aortic root to cover the region of the left The normalized cut is a graph-based segmentation tech-
ventricle outflow tract (LVOT) using cubic-spline nique, which measures the total similarity within and dis-
extrapolation. similarity between different groups [16]. A graph g is

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UðA; BÞ UðA; BÞ
NCutðA; BÞ ¼ þ ; where ð4Þ
assocðA; 2Þ assocðB; 2Þ
X
assocðA; 2Þ ¼ xe ð5Þ
e2A

where U(A, B) represents a cut separating groups A and B.

In this study, edges were calculated for six connected
neighborhood voxels (Fig. 3). The gradients were calcu-
lated in the radial direction only, to avoid the effect of
vertical gradients caused by calcifications G ¼ oI=or , where
I is the intensity.
This technique is computationally demanding for large
volumes. In the graph-based techniques, the graph nodes
and edges are presented and processed in the sparse matrix
format and its use is strongly contributing to the com-
plexity of the calculations, which is O(n3) [16], where n is
the number of nodes. Our volume of interest consists of up
Fig. 3 (Top) A schematic drawing for the aortic valve and the three to 100 slices. To keep the computation time limited, we
selected slices for validation (top, mid, and bottom slices) in black
applied the normalized cut on separated patches or volumes
dashed line (LV, LA, LVOT, AR, and Asc are standing for left
ventricle, left atrium, left ventricle outflow tract, aortic root, and with 10 slices each or less. As a postprocessing step, a 3D
ascending aorta, respectively). (Left) A schematic representation of a averaging filter was used to smooth the segmented surface
graph of two successive slices and edge connections between the six and to reduce any discontinuities between segmentation
connected nodes. (Right) Radial distance and area measures.
results of the various patches. The smoothing filter had the
Subscripts m and a stand for manual and automatic segmentation,
respectively size of 5 9 5 9 5 voxels.

composed of nodes t and edges e; g ¼ ht; ei. Nodes t 2.5 Validation

represent the cylindrical volume voxels. Edges e represent
the connection between neighboring voxels. The normal- We assessed the accuracy of the detection and segmenta-
ized cut segmentation can be performed by selecting a tion. The localization and centerline detection were visu-
minimal cost cut through the graph, which is associated ally evaluated. The accuracy of the segmentation was
with the separation between the structure of interest and assessed by comparing the segmentation results with
other noninteresting structures. manual delineations of the aortic root by two experienced
The cost of the cut U is defined as the sum of the costs of observers. The observers delineated the aortic root at three
its associated edges, where xe is the weight of the single oblique planes: at the annular level (Bottom), at the level of
cut along the single edge e. the maximum bulging of the aortic sinuses (Mid), and at
X the level of the ascending aorta (Top). We employed three
CostðUÞ ¼ xe ð2Þ accuracy measures: (1) Bland–Altman for the difference
e2U
between center to contour points distances of automatic
xe ¼ x
8ðp;qÞ ¼ xðq;pÞ and manual contours; (2) average distance difference
<0   Distðp; qÞ [ 1 between two contours, which is calculated from the center
¼ Gðp; qÞ ð3Þ to the contour and averaged over the angle; and (3) the
: exp  Distðp; qÞ  1
r2 Dice metric (Fig. 3). The accuracy was compared to the
interobserver variability.
The edges’ weights xe were calculated using the
intensity gradient magnitude G(p, q) between each of the
two connected nodes p and q. The weights were scaled by a
normalization factor r2 to steer toward large-scale 3 Results
segmentations.
Normalized cut has been proposed by Shi et al. [16], The aortic root detection algorithm correctly detected the
which solves drawbacks of the graph cut technique, e.g., aorta in all 20 cases. Table 1 displays an overview of the
the difficulty of separating two nodes groups that have low accuracy of the automatic method and the results of
contrast in between and, in comparison with the intensity the interobserver analysis. The Dice coefficient of the
variation within the single group nodes [3, 18]. automated technique and observer 1 was 0.95 ± 0.03,

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Table 1 The performance of Dice coefficient [Range] Distance error in mm [Range]

proposed algorithm compared
with observer 1 and the 3D normalized cut versus observer 1 0.95 ± 0.03 [0.85–0:988] 0.74 ± 0.39 [0.21: 1.98]
interobserver variability
Interobserver variability 0.951 ± 0.03 [0.85: 0.986] 0.68 ± 0.34 [0.21: 1.81]

Fig. 4 Six images for three different planes showing the automatic segmentation in red and the manual delineation in green. a, d Ascending
aorta cross section. b, e Sinuses cross section. c, f Left ventricle outflow tract cross section

Fig. 5 Bland–Altman plot

shows the error for different
radiuses

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Fig. 6 a, b The Dice coefficient over the three selected slices (top, mid, and bottom). c, d The mean error in mm over the three selected slices. a,
c Comparison between the proposed technique and observer 1. b, d Interobserver variability

Table 2 The performance of Modality Subjects mm/pixel Automatic Speed Mean mesh error
proposed algorithm compared
with other literature methods Grbic et al. [8] 4D CT 640 0.28–1.00 Yes N/A 1.22 mm
Lavi et al. [13] CTA 34 N/A No N/A N/A
Waechter et al. [19] CT 20 N/A Yes N/A 0.5 mm
Zheng et al. [21] C-arm CT 276 0.70–0.84 Yes 0.8 s 1.08 mm
Proposed algorithm CTA 20 0.39–0.45 Yes &90 s 0.74 mm
Interobserver variability CTA 20 0.39–0.45 No &20 min 0.68 mm

which was similar to the Dice coefficient of 0.95 ± 0.01 4 Discussion

for the interobserver analysis. The average radius differ-
ence was 0.74 ± 0.39 mm. Figure 4 shows some exam- We have presented a fully automated ascending aorta
ples of segmentation results and manual delineations. The segmentation technique based on selected geometrical
Bland–Altman plot in Fig. 5 illustrates the accuracy of the features of the connected components and normalized cut
automated technique versus manual delineations. The segmentation to detect the contours. Comparison of the
accuracy of the automated technique and the interobserver proposed technique with manual delineation shows accu-
variability for the three selected slices of validation are racies that are comparable to the interobserver variability.
shown in Fig. 6. The performance of the proposed tech- Previous studies on aortic root segmentation have
nique and the prementioned studies mentioned is shown in been reported, based on various imaging modalities. Grbic
Table 2. et al. and Waechter et al. applied their fully automated

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techniques on CT data. Lavi et al. presented and validated a 5 Conclusion

semi-automated technique using 34 CTA datasets, and
Zheng et al. have applied the marginal space learning In this study, we have introduced and validated a fully
algorithm on C-arm CT data. These methods have been automatic aortic root segmentation technique with the
developed for hemodynamic modeling or the clinical potential to be implemented in clinical practice as a sizing
application of aortic root size measurements. These studies tool for better TAVI planning and patient selection.
have presented similar or worse mean error [21] and [8] as
shown in Table 2. The accuracy of the method in [13] was Acknowledgments The authors wish to thank for the support from
the Technology Foundation STW, The Netherlands, under Grant
only evaluated qualitatively, showing a strong decrease 11630.
with decreasing image quality. As such, we believe that
their technique is not suitable in current clinical practice.
Only one study has shown a smaller mean error, but the
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