The culprit lesion and its consequences: combined visualization of the coronary arteries and delayed myocardial enhancement in dual-source CT: a pilot study.

OBJECTIVE: To assess combined analysis of coronary arteries and delayed myocardial contrast enhancement based on co-registration of coronary CT angiography and late-phase CT and automatic segmentation. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Co-registration and late enhancement segmentation were applied to coronary CT angiography and late-phase CT images from six pigs with acute myocardial infarction (MI) and six patients with chronic MI. MI size was quantified by manual delineation, the established 3SD method, and a new mixture model approach. Correspondence between coronary artery lesions and MI was assessed visually from fused segmentation results.