Patent ID: 8718342

Claim:
A method for determining the proportion of calcium in coronary arteries using image data of a heart from CT angiography, comprising: detecting anatomical landmarks in an image data in the region of the heart and segmenting the coronary arteries, taking into account the detected anatomical landmarks; identifying and labeling the segmented coronary arteries based on an analysis of a spatial location of the segmented coronary arteries, the analysis including dividing a region into subregions and assigning a label to each of the subregions based on statistical assumptions relating to the spatial location of the coronary arteries, wherein segmented coronary arteries that mainly run in one of the subregions obtain the label assigned to the one of the subregions; segmenting regions with an increased HU- or brightness value, compared to a contrast agent surroundings, in the segmented coronary arteries; and calculating a proportion of calcium from respective segmented regions for one or more of the segmented coronary arteries, wherein at least the segmenting and calculating are carried out fully automatically by a data-processing system, and weighting factors for the individual regions are used when calculating the proportion of calcium, the weighting factors depending on both a threshold for the segmenting of a respective region and a volume of the respective region.