A stable and quantitative method for dimensionality reduction of aortic centerline

Aortic dissection (AD) is a fatal aortic disease with high mortality. Assessing the morphology of the aorta is critical for diagnostic and surgical decisions. Aortic centerline projection methods have been used to evaluate the morphology of the aorta. However, there is a big difference between the current model of primary plane projection (PPP) and the actual shape of individuals, which is not conducive to morphological statistical analysis. Finding a method to compress the three-dimensional information of the aorta into two dimensions is helpful to clinical decision-making. In this paper, the evaluation parameters, including contour length (CL), enclosure area, and the sum of absolute residuals (SAR), were introduced to objectively evaluate the optimal projection plane rather than artificial subjective judgment. Our results showed that the optimal projection plane could be objectively characterized by the three evaluation parameters. As the morphological criterion, SAR is optimal among the three parameters. Compared to the optimal projection plane selected by traditional PPP, our method has better AD discrimination in the analysis of aortic tortuosity, and is conducive to the clinical operation of AD. Thus, it has application prospects for the preprocessing techniques for the geometric morphology analysis of AD.