Quantification of arterial flow using digital subtraction angiography.

In this paper, a method for the estimation of arterial hemodynamic flow from x-ray video densitometry data is proposed and validated using an in vitro setup. The method is based on the acquisition of three-dimensional rotational angiography and digital subtraction angiography sequences. A modest contrast injection rate (between 1 and 4 ml/s) leads to a contrast density that is modulated by the cardiac cycle, which can be measured in the x-ray signal. An optical flow based approach is used to estimate the blood flow velocities from the cyclic phases in the x-ray signal. The authors have validated this method in vitro, and present three clinical cases. The in vitro experiments compared the x-ray video densitometry results with the gold standard delivered by a flow meter. Linear correlation analysis and regression fitting showed that the ideal slope of 1 and intercept of 0 were contained within the 95 percentile confidence interval. The results show that a frame rate higher than 50 Hz allows measuring flows in the range of 2 ml/s to 6 ml/s within an accuracy of 5%. The in vitro and clinical results indicate that it is feasible to estimate blood flow in routine interventional procedures. The availability of an x-ray based method for quantitative flow estimation is particularly clinically useful for intra-cranial applications, where other methods, such as ultrasound Doppler, are not available.

Citation

Odile Bonnefous, Vitor Mendes Pereira, Rafik Ouared, Olivier Brina, Hans Aerts, Roel Hermans, Fred van Nijnatten, Jean Stawiaski, Daniel Ruijters. Quantification of arterial flow using digital subtraction angiography. Medical physics. 2012 Oct;39(10):6264-75

Mesh Tags

PMID: 23039662

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