Quo vadis cardiovascular informatics?

In spite of the advancement and proliferation of cardiovascular imaging, the rate of deaths due to unpredicted heart attack remains high. Thus, it becomes imperative to develop novel computational tools to mine quantitative parameters from the imaging data for early detection of asymptomatic cardiovascular disease. Coronary calcification burden has been reported to be a significant and independent predictor of the atherosclerosis disease, and is associated with future cardiac events. Additionally, increased neovascularization of the plaque has been identified as a common feature of coronary plaque inflammation and has been defined as a plaque vulnerability index. In this paper, we present methods to extract and quantify coronary calcifications in the non-contrast cardiac CT scans and to detect neovascularization in the coronary vessels using contrast-enhanced intra-vascular ultrasound imaging.