Open-source, fully automated framework for end-to-end aortic analysis from CT angiography (CTA), built on top of TotalSegmentator baseline segmentations with additional refinement. AortaExplorer extracts established biomarkers such as diameters across anatomical segments defined by the European Society of Cardiology, and introduces new metrics including aortic tortuosity. Diameter measurements were validated against expert manual readings in more than 10,000 CTA scans from Danish population cohorts, and the tortuosity index's increase with age is consistent with prior literature; the tool reduces per-case analysis time from about 15 minutes to under 5 minutes.

Cross-modality cardiac image segmentation model that addresses spatial-temporal confounding -- where the anatomy and imaging-modality elements of cardiac images are intertwined across space and time. DCL performs multi-dimensional causal intervention, modeling causal relationships between images and labels as well as causality along the time and space dimensions, integrating historical optimal interventions to transfer knowledge across temporal contexts. A diffusion mechanism further keeps extracted anatomical elements causally invariant across modalities. On cross-modality cardiac images (MR, CT, and ultrasound), DCL achieved a mean Dice of 0.951, outperforming other advanced segmentation methods.

Machine-learning surrogate model for estimating pulsatile hemodynamic fields (velocity, pressure) in coronary arteries from a steady-state computational fluid dynamics (CFD) prior, avoiding the high computational cost of full pulsatile CFD. The model, a neural field conditioned on hemodynamic boundary conditions, is discretisation-independent and can be parametrised with message-passing or self-attention layers by relaxing point-wise action to permutation-equivariance. Evaluated on 74 stenotic coronary arteries from coronary CT angiography (CCTA) with patient-specific pulsatile CFD as ground truth, the model produced accurate, discretisation-independent estimates of pulsatile velocity and pressure fields.

Deep learning model for multi-class 3D segmentation of the aorta and its thirteen branches from CT angiography, intended to support planning of endovascular aortic interventions. CIS-UNet combines a CNN encoder with a symmetric decoder and a novel Context-aware Shifted Window Self-Attention (CSW-SA) bottleneck block that adapts the Swin transformer's patch-merging mechanism to more efficiently capture global spatial context. Trained and evaluated via 4-fold cross-validation on the first public multi-branch aorta CTA dataset (59 patients), CIS-UNet outperformed the state-of-the-art SwinUNETR baseline, achieving a mean Dice of 0.713 vs. 0.697 and mean surface distance of 2.78mm vs. 3.39mm, while being more computationally efficient.

nnU-Net-based pipeline for automated detection and sub-classification of acute thoracic aortic dissection (AD) on heterogeneous CT imaging, formulated as a semantic segmentation task rather than direct image classification. The model segments the false lumen (ascending and descending) and the dissection membrane -- along with optional indirect signs such as hemopericardium, aortic wall hematoma, and supra-aortic branch dissection -- and a patient is classified as AD-positive if at least two of the three primary segmented regions exceed a volume threshold tuned via Youden's index; the same pipeline additionally flags Stanford type A dissections. Trained on 157 heterogeneous internal CT studies (not restricted to a single contrast protocol) from Mannheim University Medical Centre and evaluated on an internal held-out test set as well as public external datasets (ImageTBAD and AVT), the model reached an AUROC of 98.7% internally and 97.0% externally, and correctly flagged 93.3% of dissection cases that had not been clinically suspected before imaging. The authors state the trained network will be made publicly available as a non-medical device for further scientific research.

Coronary artery calcium (CAC) scoring model that transfers a CNN trained for calcium scoring on non-contrast CT (NCCT) to coronary CT angiography (CCTA), where iodinated contrast otherwise confounds calcium detection and large annotated CCTA training sets are scarce. The CAC-scoring CNN is split into a feature generator and a classifier; the feature generator is trained on the NCCT source domain and adapted to the CCTA target domain via adversarial learning combined with a maximum-mean-discrepancy loss, while the source-domain classifier is reused unchanged for the target domain. Builds directly on the authors' earlier non-contrast CT calcium-scoring network.

End-to-end deep learning framework that predicts the procedural outcome of percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) for chronic total occlusion (CTO) lesions directly from preprocedural coronary CT angiography, aiming to replace slower manual scoring systems (J-CTO, CT-RECTOR, KCCT). The pipeline first segments the coronary artery tree (Patch-UCTNet), detects candidate CTO lesions along the delineated vessel, extracts pathological lesion features with a Swin Transformer, and classifies two outcomes: successful guidewire crossing within 30 minutes and overall PCI success. In the original study, the model completed reconstruction and analysis 85% faster than manual scores (73.7s vs. 418-467s) and was more accurate than the manual CT-RECTOR, KCCT, and J-CTO_CCTA_ scores, reaching an AUROC of 0.97 on the internal test set and 0.96 on an independent external validation cohort (186 patients, 189 CTO lesions).

U-Net-variant segmentation model that identifies and quantifies coronary artery calcium (CAC) directly from routine non-gated, non-contrast chest CT scans -- the kind ordered for lung-cancer screening or unrelated indications rather than a dedicated cardiac scan -- so that the tens of millions of such scans performed annually can be opportunistically screened for cardiovascular risk without any extra imaging. Predicted calcium masks are combined with the CT's Hounsfield units to compute an Agatston-equivalent score. Trained on 446 expert-segmented scans from 98 medical centers across the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs national health system (capturing substantial heterogeneity in scanners and protocols) and benchmarked against 795 patients with a paired same-year gated CAC study: nongated AI-CAC differentiates zero-vs-nonzero and <100-vs->=100 Agatston categories with 89.4% (F1 0.93) and 87.3% (F1 0.89) accuracy respectively, and its score stratifies 10-year all-cause mortality (CAC 0 vs. >400: 25.4% vs. 60.2%, hazard ratio 3.49) and composite stroke/MI/death risk (33.5% vs. 63.8%, hazard ratio 3.00). In a simulated opportunistic-screening run across 8,052 low-dose CT scans, cardiologists confirmed 99.2% of patients flagged with AI-CAC >400 would benefit from lipid-lowering therapy. Code and trained model weights are both public under an MIT license.

Largest federated cardiac CT analysis to date (n=8,104 scans) across a real-world federation of German university hospitals, addressing partially-labeled data across sites via a two-step semi-supervised knowledge-distillation strategy: task-specific CNNs first predict on unlabeled data per label type, then a SWIN-UNETR transformer learns from these predictions with label-specific heads. Learns a single federated model that simultaneously predicts TAVI-relevant landmarks (aortic hinge points, coronary ostia, membranous septum) and calcification from cardiac CT, improving generalizability over UNet-based baselines on downstream tasks.