Epicardial coronary angiography from microbubble-based tridimensional echocardiography: A feasibility study

Conventional coronary angiography has been the current gold standard for evaluation of coronary stenosis severity. However, this is an invasive procedure, based on ionizing radiation (X-Ray) and dependent of nephrotoxic contrast agents. In the past three decades, echocardiography has emerged as an important medical image modality in Cardiology. With the advent of microbubble-based contrast agents and array transducers, 3D-echocardiography now presents itself as a relative low-cost, non invasive and non ionizing alternative method to visualize arteries and their dynamics. This paper investigates some segmentation techniques to emphasize and isolate epicardial coronaries in tridimensional microbubble-contrasted echocardiographic images, since available computational tools do not provide adequate processing.