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Abstract #2119

Causal discovery of morphological changes in thoracic aorta: Investigation on a large epidemiological non-contrast-enhanced MRI cohort

Louisa Fay1,2, Tobias Hepp1, Bin Yang2, Sergios Gatidis1,3, and Thomas Kuestner1
1Medical Image and Data Analysis (MIDAS.lab), Department of Diagnostic and Interventional Radiology, University Hospital of Tuebingen, Tuebingen, Germany, 2Institute of Signal Processing and System Theory, University of Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany, 3Stanford Medicine, Department of Radiology, Palo Alto, CA, United States

Synopsis

Keywords: Analysis/Processing, Vessels, Thoracic Aorta, Segmentation, Landmark Detection, Causal Discovery

Motivation: The thoracic aorta is often affected by life-threatening, undetected morphological changes. Prior works primarily focused on factors correlating with aortic aneurysms but lack the investigation of causal influences related to morphological changes.

Goal(s): Our goal is to perform automatic aortic shape analysis inline on the scanner. We investigate causal dependencies between metadata and thoracic aortic diameter in approx. 30,000 non-contrast-enhanced MRA.

Approach: We apply a deep learning framework for shape analysis and Peter-Clark-algorithm to investigate causal influences on the thoracic aorta.

Results: We found that sex, age, height, BMI, hypertension, and vascular-stiffness causally impact the aorta’s diameter, whereas diabetes lacks a causal relationship.

Impact: This study reveals causal influences on morphological changes of the thoracic aorta using a large epidemiological dataset (~30,000 non-contrast-enhanced-MRA). A deep-learning-based framework supports the identification of causal factors impacting the aortic diameter and thereby, enabling early detection of life-threatening risks.

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Keywords