Description and Use of Three-Dimensional Numerical Phantoms of Cardiac Computed Tomography Images

Abstract

The World Health Organization indicates the top cause of death is heart disease. These diseases can be detected using several imaging modalities, especially cardiac computed tomography (CT), whose images have imperfections associated with noise and certain artifacts. To minimize the impact of these imperfections on the quality of the CT images, several researchers have developed digital image processing techniques (DPIT) by which the quality is evaluated considering several metrics and databases (DB), both real and simulated. This article describes the processes that made it possible to generate and utilize six three-dimensional synthetic cardiac DBs or voxels-based numerical phantoms. An exhaustive analysis of the most relevant features of images of the left ventricle, belonging to a real CT DB of the human heart, was performed. These features are recreated in the synthetic DBs, generating a reference phantom or ground truth free of imperfections (DB1) and five phantoms, in which Poisson noise (DB2), stair-step artifact (DB3), streak artifact (DB4), both artifacts (DB5) and all imperfections (DB6) are incorporated. These DBs can be used to determine the performance of DPIT, aimed at decreasing the effect of these imperfections on the quality of cardiac images.