Title
IVUS images segmentation using spatial fuzzy clustering and hierarchical level set evolution.
Abstract
The detection of the lumen and media-adventitia (MA) borders in intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) images is crucial for quantifying plaque burdens. The challenge of the segmentation work mainly roots in various artifacts in the image. Most of the published methods involve the establishment of complex models but do not behave well on images with artifacts. In this study, aiming at automatically delineating borders in IVUS frames acquired by 20 MHz ultrasound probes, we present a fuzzy clustering-initialized hierarchical level set evolution (FC-HLSE) method. A cluster selection strategy based on the spatial fuzzy c-means (FCM) is proposed to generate the initial value and regularization term of the level set evolution (LSE). The contour convergence splits into two LSE steps between which an ingenious contour extraction (consisting of the morphological processing, the seek and linear interpolation, the gradient-based and circular fitting-based refinement) is carried out. We evaluate the proposed methodology on the publicly available 435 images by comparing auto-segmented results with the ground truth. The performance of the method is quantified using the Jaccard measure (JM), the Hausdorff distance (HD), the percentage of area difference (PAD), the linear regression and Bland-Altman analysis. Results reveal that our method can handle images with or without artifacts. The algorithm is able to extract the lumen/MA border with the JM of 0.90/0.89, the HD of 0.31/0.40 mm, the PAD of 0.07/0.08 in average, which is better in some cases compared with several state-of-the-art methods.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1016/j.compbiomed.2019.04.029
Computers in Biology and Medicine
Keywords
Field
DocType
Intravascular ultrasound,Border detection,Spatial fuzzy clustering,Hierarchical level set evolution
Computer vision,Fuzzy clustering,Pattern recognition,Segmentation,Computer science,Fuzzy logic,Level set,Ground truth,Hausdorff distance,Artificial intelligence,Jaccard index,Linear interpolation
Journal
Volume
ISSN
Citations 
109
0010-4825
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Menghua Xia122.04
Wenjun Yan2288.43
Yi Huang385098.48
Yi Guo4126.26
Guohui Zhou57329.90
Yuanyuan Wang67729.25