Fully-convolutional deep-learning based system for coronary calcium score prediction from non-contrast chest CT
Abstract
The amount of calcium deposits in the coronary arteries is an important biomarker of cardiovascular disease. Coronary calcium has traditionally been quantified as an Agatston score using ECG-synchronized cardiac CT. Coronary calcium is rarely quantified from general chest CT scans, of which nearly 10 Million are performed in the US annually. We present an automatic method based on fully-convolutional deep neural network to segment coronary calcium and predict Agatston score from any non-contrast chest CT. We experimented with an internal dataset acquired through partnership with a large health organization in Israel. The dataset is composed of 1054 Chest CTs and reflects a variety of originating institutions, acquisition devices and manufacturers. In comparison to expert manual annotations, our algorithm achieved a Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.98. Bland-Altman analysis demonstrated a bias of 0.4 with 95% limits of agreement of [-189.9-190.7]). Our linearly weighted Kappa results are 0.89 for Agatston risk category assignment. We also applied our method on a very large (14,365 subjects) cohort from the National Lung Screening Trial (NLST). We demonstrate correlation of the algorithm predictions with cardiovascular-related clinical outcomes.
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Other studies that investigated deep learning algorithms for automated coronary calcium quantification used smaller cohorts or proprietary technologies.
“Although other studies have investigated deep learning algorithms for automated coronary calcium quantification34–42, they used smaller cohorts or proprietary technologies.”
From Deep convolutional neural networks to predict cardiovascular risk from computed tomography (2021) · cites this paper as [40]
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- Authors
- Shadmi, R., Mazo, V., Bregman-Amitai, O., & Elnekave, E.
- Venue
- 2018 IEEE 15th International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging (ISBI 2018)
- Publisher
- IEEE
- Published
- 2018-04
- Pages
- 24-28
- OpenAlex
- W2807121762
- Cited by
- 59
- References
- 17
- Citations by year
- 2025: 5 · 2024: 9 · 2023: 5 · 2022: 8 · 2021: 12 · 2020: 6 · 2019: 10 · 2018: 4
- FWCI
- 15.21
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging (ISBI) (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Health Sciences › Medicine › Radiology, Nuclear Medicine and Imaging › Cardiac Imaging and Diagnostics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Medical Image Segmentation Techniques
- Health Sciences › Medicine › Radiology, Nuclear Medicine and Imaging › COVID-19 diagnosis using AI
- Keywords
- coronary artery calcium, Agatston score, non-contrast chest CT, fully convolutional network, cardiovascular risk prediction, National Lung Screening Trial, calcium quantification, cardiovascular biomarkers
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