Quantifying calcification in the lumbar aorta on X-ray images.

In this paper we propose to use inpainting to estimate the severity of atherosclerotic plaques from X-ray projections. Inpainting allows to "remove" the plaque and estimate what the background image for an uncalcified aorta would have looked like. A measure of plaque severity can then be derived by subtracting the inpainting from the original image. In contrast to the current standard of categorical calcification scoring from X-rays, our method estimates both the size and the density of calcified areas and provides a continuous severity score, thus allowing for measurement of more subtle differences. We discuss a class of smooth inpainting methods, compare their ability to reconstruct the original images, and compare the inpainting based calcification score to the conventional categorical score in a longitudinal study on 49 patients addressing correlations of the calcification scores with hypertension, a known cardiovascular risk factor.