Important parameters in quantitative coronary angiography (QCA) are the severity and length of the lesion, the radius of the nonstenotic part of the affected vessel segment and the bifurcation angle (in the case of a bifurcation lesion). Unfortunately, QCA results can be influenced by the viewing angles corresponding to the angiographic images used to perform the QCA. To deal with this viewpoint dependency, computer systems have been developed which determine the optimal angiographic viewing angles (the best possible viewing angles to perform QCA) using a threedimensional (3-D) reconstruction of the coronary arteries. In this paper, a method is presented to determine the optimal viewing angles in a very fast and robust way, without the need of a 3-D reconstruction.Validation using images of phantoms and clinical images proves its accuracy. D 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
J. Christiaens, Rik Van de Walle, P. Gheeraert, Y.