Hard Plaque Characteristics Based Media-Adventitia Border Detection in Intravascular Ultrasound Images
1 Biomedical Engineering School of Southern Medical University, Guangzhou 510515, China
2 Department of Radiology, Leiden University Medical Center, Leiden, the Netherlands
Abstract：This paper presents a new approach for the detection of media-adventitia border in intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) images, to overcome problems of hard plaque and acoustic shadow which make mediaadventitia difficult to detect. The approach started with image classification using k-means algorithm, such that the region of hard plaques was delineated from the IVUS image. In a next step, a cost matrix was created by combining image gradient, hard plaque location and image intensity. A heuristic graph-searching was then applied to find the media-adventitia border from the cost matrix. Experiment results showed that the approach improved the accuracy of media-adventitia border detection by overcoming problems caused by acoustic shadow and hard plaque inhomogeneity, and the correct rate reached 95.57%.
