Project investigators :Dr Sandra I Woolley, Dr Mike Spann (School of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, The University of Birmingham) and Dr John Townend (Dept. Cardiology, The Queen Elizabeth Hospital). Research Fellows : Dave Gibson and George Tsibidis

Angiogram video is used by cardiologists to diagnose coronary heart diseases such as stenosis (narrowing) and during surgical procedures such as angioplasty (balloon expansion of collapsed arteries). These pages present the aims and results of a 3-year project supported by EPSRC for the purpose of efficient and robust compression of angiogram video sequences.


Angiogram images : (left) Pre-angioplasty angiogram showing a narrowed coronary artery and (right) after angioplasty balloon-injection showing the expanded coronary artery.

Each patient’s records, approximately 5 minutes of video, requires compression for storage onto CD media. The project addresses the problems of compressing digital angiograms for on-line storage within large cardiology units and low bandwidth transmission from small cardiology units within district general hospitals and mobile units. The Queen Elizabeth cardiology department currently has two digital angiogram facilities and is a regional centre for the West Midlands. Our research programme is looking at ways in which the frames can be segmented into areas which must be reconstructed accurately from the decompressed video and areas which contain less useful information and can tolerate reconstruction errors and how this segmentation can be tracked between frames. A second stage will consider the spatio-temporal modelling of features within each region in order to develop a multi-stage video coder which can take into account the different coding requirements from each region. The research programme will also consider the requirements of an on-line archive and the effects of uncorrected channel (and storage) errors on data integrity. Evaluation will be based on expert end-user assessment of the diagnostic quality of the decompressed video compared to the original.

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Last updated 19 November 2000