An off-line gating method for suppressing motion artifacts in ICUSsequence

Intracoronary ultrasound (ICUS) imaging, an invasive catheter-based imaging modality, has been widely used in clinical diagnosis of coronary artery diseases. Motion artifacts due to cyclic cardiac motion and pulsatile blood are the main factors that hinder the visualization of ICUS longitudinal cut and 3D vessel reconstruction from ICUS image sequence. The aim of this work is to propose an off-line gating method based on ICUS image properties to suppress motion artifacts for continuous pullback ICUS image sequences acquired in vivo covering several cardiac cycles without the help of ECG signals. Based on analysis of intensity features of each ICUS frame, a difference matrix is firstly constructed. Then, potential information about cardiac cycle is extracted from the matrix and the correspondence of each ICUS frame in successive cardiac cycles is obtained through finding a globally optimal path with the lowest cumulative difference value in the matrix. Finally, a subsequence of frames each acquired at the end-diastole of each cardiac cycle is selected to obtain the gated sequence. The main advantage of this method is that it is applicable to those ICUS sequences where the subject's heart rate may be irregular during image acquisition. Also, any high-level image analysis performed to ICUS images is not needed. Results are given for clinical image data of patients in order to validate the proposed method.

[1]  Patrick W Serruys,et al.  Retrospective image‐based gating of intracoronary ultrasound images for improved quantitative analysis: The intelligate method , 2004, Catheterization and cardiovascular interventions : official journal of the Society for Cardiac Angiography & Interventions.

[2]  Petia Radeva,et al.  Modelling of image-catheter motion for 3-D IVUS , 2009, Medical Image Anal..

[3]  Ioannis A. Kakadiaris,et al.  Image-Based Frame Gating for Contrast-Enhanced IVUS Sequences , 2006 .

[4]  Aaron Fenster,et al.  Image-based retrospective cardiac gating for three-dimensional intravascular ultrasound imaging , 2002, SPIE Medical Imaging.

[5]  Sun Zheng,et al.  Application of Dynamic Programming in Dynamic Image Sequence Analysis , 2008, 2008 International Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Design.

[6]  Morton H. Friedman,et al.  Retrieval of cardiac phase from IVUS sequences , 2003, SPIE Medical Imaging.

[7]  J. Barajas,et al.  Cardiac Phase Extraction in IVUS Sequences using 1-D Gabor Filters , 2007, 2007 29th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society.

[8]  C von Birgelen,et al.  ECG-gated versus nongated three-dimensional intracoronary ultrasound analysis: implications for volumetric measurements. , 1998, Catheterization and cardiovascular diagnosis.

[9]  Morteza Naghavi,et al.  Image-Based Frame Gating of IVUS Pullbacks: A Surrogate for ECG , 2007, 2007 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing - ICASSP '07.

[10]  Takashi Yoneyama,et al.  Cardiac phase detection in intravascular ultrasound images , 2008, SPIE Medical Imaging.

[11]  Aaron Fenster,et al.  Image-based cardiac gating for three-dimensional intravascular ultrasound imaging. , 2005, Ultrasound in medicine & biology.

[12]  Ioannis A. Kakadiaris,et al.  Image-Based Gating of Intravascular Ultrasound Pullback Sequences , 2008, IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in Biomedicine.

[13]  D. Rotger,et al.  Image-based ECG sampling of IVUS sequences , 2008, 2008 IEEE Ultrasonics Symposium.

[14]  C von Birgelen,et al.  Electrocardiogram-gated intravascular ultrasound image acquisition after coronary stent deployment facilitates on-line three-dimensional reconstruction and automated lumen quantification. , 1997, Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

[15]  Petia Radeva,et al.  Robust Image-Based IVUS Pullbacks Gating , 2008, MICCAI.

[16]  N. Bruining,et al.  A novel retrospective gating method for intracoronary ultrasound images based on image properties , 2003, Computers in Cardiology, 2003.