Problems in Acquisition and Representation of Coronary Arterial Trees

The nature of the contractions of the heart wall has long been recognized as indicative of the presence and degree of atherosclerotic lesions in the coronary arteries. More recently, the coronary arterial tree-itself has been studied and the changes in length of the arterial segments during a heart cycle have been shown to have diagnostic value for coronary artery disease. Further, it has beenproposed that the geometry of the tree influences the natureand location of lesions in the walls of thecoronary vessels. To further study the relation between the physical configuration of the coronary tree and the development or presence of coronary artery disease it will be neces- sary to develop algorithms for the efficient measure- ment, representation, and storage of coronary trees by computer. This paper is a report of preliminaryefforts to process trees by computer and a discus- sion of some of the problems involved in this effort. © 1975 IEEE. All rights reserved.

Duke Scholars

Author Charles Franklin Starmer Computer Science