Global optimization of optimal angiographic viewing angles for coronary arteries with multiple segments

For angiographic images, different imaging angles may lead to different degrees of foreshortening and overlap, which hence considerably interferes with the angiogram based diagnosis of vascular diseases. In this study, a composite optimization method is proposed to determine the optimal viewing angle of angiograms, which can fully considerate stenosis and the interference caused due to multiple vascular segments. In order to obtain the optimal angle for segments at multiple branches´ intersection, a hyper plane optimization method is proposed to separate the relative branches. The optimal angle for stenosis is designed by minimizing area of the projections of the vascular segments. The multiple segments and the stenosis optimization are integrated with the foreshortening and overlap, which can hence give a more objective viewing angle of the coronary arteries from angiographic images. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is very effective and robust for optimizing the projection angle.