Toward Robust Myocardial Blush Grade Estimation in Contrast Angiography

Abstract. The assessment of Myocardial Blush Grade after primary angioplasty is a precious diagnostic tool to understand if the patient needs further medication or the use of specifics drugs. Unfortunately, the assessment of MBG is difficult for non highly specialized staff. Experimental data show that there is poor correlation between MBG assessment of low and high specialized staff, thus reducing its applicability. This paper proposes a method able to achieve an objective measure of MBG, or a set of parameters that correlates with the MBG. The method tracks the blush area starting from just one single frame tagged by the physician. As a consequence, the blush area is kept isolated from contaminating phenomena such as diaphragm and arteries movements. We also present a method to extract four parameters that are expected to correlate with the MBG. Preliminary results show that the method is capable of extracting interesting information regarding the behavior of the myocardial perfus...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: IBPRIA
• Authors: Carlo Gatta, Juan Diego Gomez Valencia, Francesco Ciompi, Oriol Rodriguez-Leor, Petia Radeva
• Keywords: Blush Area, IBPRIA 2009, MBG Assessment, Myocardial Blush Grade, Pattern Recognition