Pericoronary adipose tissue (PCAT) is the deposition of fat in the vicinity
of the coronary arteries. It is an indicator of coronary inflammation and
associated with coronary artery disease. Non-invasive coronary CT angiography
(CCTA) is presently used to obtain measures of the thickness, volume, and
attenuation of fat deposition. However, prior works solely focus on measuring
PCAT using semi-automated approaches at the right coronary artery (RCA) over
the left coronary artery (LCA). In this pilot work, we developed a fully
automated approach for the measurement of PCAT mean attenuation and volume in
the region around both coronary arteries. First, we used a large subset of
patients from the public ImageCAS dataset (n = 735) to train a 3D full
resolution nnUNet to segment LCA and RCA. Then, we automatically measured PCAT
in the surrounding arterial regions. We evaluated our method on a held-out test
set of patients (n = 183) from the same dataset. A mean Dice score of 83% and
PCAT attenuation of -73.81 $\pm$ 12.69 HU was calculated for the RCA, while a
mean Dice score of 81% and PCAT attenuation of -77.51 $\pm$ 7.94 HU was
computed for the LCA. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to develop
a fully automated method to measure PCAT attenuation and volume at both the RCA
and LCA. Our work underscores how automated PCAT measurement holds promise as a
biomarker for identification of inflammation and cardiac disease.

我们开发了一种全自动的方法，对冠状动脉周围的区域进行心周脂肪均值和体积的测量。我们在公共 ImageCAS 数据集的一个大子集上训练了一个三维全分辨率的 nnUNet 来分割左冠状动脉和右冠状动脉。然后，我们自动测量了冠状动脉周围的心周脂肪。我们在同一数据集的一个独立测试集上评估了我们的方法，得到了 RCA 的平均 Dice 分数为 83％，心周脂肪均值衰减为 - 73.81 ± 12.69 HU，而 LCA 的平均 Dice 分数为 81％，心周脂肪均值衰减为 - 77.51 ± 7.94 HU。我们是第一个开发出全自动测量冠状动脉周围心周脂肪衰减和体积的方法。我们的工作突显了自动化心周脂肪测量在炎症和心脏疾病识别中的潜力。