Component-composition based heart isolation for 3D volume visualization of coronary arteries

Heart isolation (separating the heart from the neighboring tissues, e.g, lung, liver, and rib cage) is a prerequisite to generate a 3D volume visualization as an intuitive view for coronary disease diagnosis and treatment planning. Previously, we proposed a component-carving based heart isolation approach by removing unwanted background tissues (e.g, non-cardiac structures, left atrial appendage, and pulmonary veins/arteries) sequentially. However, the final mask usually has many small extra pieces due to the difficulty to model and segment all background tissues. In this paper, we propose a component-composition based approach, which starts from an empty mask and then adds in wanted components (coronary arteries, four chambers, and the aorta) segmented from the original image. The proposed method can generate a much cleaner mask than the component-carving approach since only the wanted structures are added and the segmentation of the heart chambers and the aorta is more robust and accurate due to their greater predictability.