Lesion-specific coronary artery calcium quantification better predicts cardiac events

CT-based coronary artery calcium (CAC) scanning has been introduced as a non-invasive, low-radiation imaging technique for the assessment of the overall coronary arterial atherosclerotic burden. A three dimensional CAC volume contains significant clinically relevant information, which is unused by conventional whole-heart CAC quantification methods. In this paper, we have developed a more detailed distance-weighted lesion-specific CAC quantification framework that predicts cardiac events better than the conventional whole-heart CAC measures. This framework consists of (1) a novel lesion-specific CAC quantification tool that measures each calcific lesion´s attenuation, morphologic and geometric statistics; (2) a distance-weighted event risk model to estimate the risk probability caused by each lesion, and (3) a Naive Bayesian technique for risk integration. We have tested our lesion-specific event predictor on 30 CAC positive scans (10 with events and 20 without events), and compared it with conventional whole-heart CAC scores. Experiment results showed our novel approach significantly improves the prediction accuracy, including AUC of ROC analysis was improved from 66 ~ 68% to 75%, and sensitivities was improved by 20 ~ 30% at the cutpoints of 80% specificity.