Where is the plaque?

It has been a month or two since I started working on the segmentation of the arteries from the cardiac CT images. This project has been in the lab for two generations of students (I am the third generation). The first student worked on the vessel extraction. The second generation student worked on the center line extraction and the area calculation of the extracted vessel. My mission is to analyze the roughness along the vessel walls.

There are a calcium deposits or cholestrol deposits etc that add roughness to the vessels (arteries) in the heart. The arteries supply oxygen to the heart muscle, so that the heart can do the pumping job properly. When calcium/cholestrol etc get deposited, the blood supply is cut off , resulting in myocardial infarction (heart attack). My mission is to use the image processing techniques to find out the deposits.

After two months, I am pretty much comfortable with identifying the arteries (manually). But now it is time to go one step further - to be able to identify the deposits too, visually. When everytime, the doctor with whom I interact with for the project, says "look at the left anterior artery, there is a soft plaque there"... I say "hmmm yaah, I can see it.."... But honestly it is a "King and the new robe" story.

If I am able to visually say the location of the plaque, I can try to develop algorithm for extracting its location. Looks like mission impossible. :( But I will keep trying.

and yes, next time you see me, bring your CT images... I can look at it and tell whether you have a healthy heart or not. :)

PS: Did you know? Saying "someone has a big heart!" is not actually a compliment. Big heart means more "Tension" on the heart walls. This means more oxygen usage to produce the same amount of blood pressure (this is almost a constant for any healthy individual) as a smaller heart.