Title
Intravascular ultrasound image segmentation: a three-dimensional fast-marching method based on gray level distributions
Abstract
Intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) is a catheter based medical imaging technique particularly useful for studying atherosclerotic disease. It produces cross-sectional images of blood vessels that provide quantitative assessment of the vascular wall, information about the nature of atherosclerotic lesions as well as plaque shape and size. Automatic processing of large IVUS data sets represents an important challenge due to ultrasound speckle, catheter artifacts or calcification shadows. A new three-dimensional (3-D) IVUS segmentation model, that is based on the fast-marching method and uses gray level probability density functions (PDFs) of the vessel wall structures, was developed. The gray level distribution of the whole IVUS pullback was modeled with a mixture of Rayleigh PDFs. With multiple interface fast-marching segmentation, the lumen, intima plus plaque structure, and media layers of the vessel wall were computed simultaneously. The PDF-based fast-marching was applied to 9 in vivo IVUS pullbacks of superficial femoral arteries and to a simulated IVUS pullback. Accurate results were obtained on simulated data with average point to point distances between detected vessel wall borders and ground truth <0.072 mm. On in vivo IVUS, a good overall performance was obtained with average distance between segmentation results and manually traced contours <0.16 mm. Moreover, the worst point to point variation between detected and manually traced contours stayed low with Hausdorff distances <0.40 mm, indicating a good performance in regions lacking information or containing artifacts. In conclusion, segmentation results demonstrated the potential of gray level PDF and fast-marching methods in 3-D IVUS image processing.
Year
DOI
Venue
2006
10.1109/TMI.2006.872142
Medical Imaging, IEEE Transactions
Keywords
Field
DocType
biomedical ultrasonics,blood vessels,catheters,diseases,image segmentation,medical image processing,3-D IVUS image processing,atherosclerotic disease,blood vessels,calcification shadows,catheter artifacts,catheter-based medical imaging,gray level distribution,gray level probability density functions,intima,intravascular ultrasound image segmentation,lumen,plaque structure,superficial femoral arteries,three-dimensional fast-marching method,ultrasound speckle,vascular wall,vessel wall structures,3-D imaging,Fast-marching,IVUS,probability density function,segmentation
Computer vision,Data set,Intravascular ultrasound,Speckle pattern,Medical imaging,Segmentation,Fast marching method,Image processing,Image segmentation,Artificial intelligence,Mathematics
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
25
5
0278-0062
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
49
2.81
10
Authors
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Marie-Hélène Roy Cardinal1927.38
Jean Meunier267359.36
Gilles Soulez315718.24
Roch L. Maurice49510.54
Éric Thérasse5564.05
Guy Cloutier6685.47