Three Dimensional Reconstruction of the Components of the Carotid Plaque From Standard CT Medical Images

The present study compares plaque and calcium volumes between sixteen diseased human carotid arteries. Half were from symptomatic patients, and half were from asymptomatic patients. In-house software was developed for the 3-D reconstruction of the plaque components from computerized tomography (CT) images. Results revealed higher mean total volume (TV) in the symptomatic group compared to the asymptomatic group. In contrast, the mean ratio of calcium volume (CV) to TV was lower for the symptomatic group compared to the asymptomatic group. This shows that symptomatic patients have a significantly greater plaque burden with minimal plaque calcification. The process of acquiring the data helped understand what tools/features are needed to conduct this work. One important feature of this software is the ability to create automated regions of interest (ROI) in addition to simple manual selection/modification of the ROIs in a GUI environment.