Visual alignment of arteries in coronary cine-angiogram using global motion stabilisation approach

Coronary cine-angiogram (CCA) is an invasive medical image modality, which is used to detect stenosis in coronary arteries (CA). Global motion that occurs due to the heart beat is a major obstruction to visually track correlated arterial flow within CCAs. This study devises a novel method to align the main CA visualised among the CCA frames using global motion stabilisation. In order to stabilise the global motion artifact, motion vectors are calculated through improved template matching technique, which is introduced in this study to match a given CA template with the CCA frame that contains deformed CA tree. The accuracy of the proposed content alignment method was reported as 97.45 %. The content aligned global motion stabilised CCA is produced as the output of this study and those CCAs can be used to further enhance the angiography image modality, to determine the functional significance of CA to assess the severity level of the detected stenosis.