Shape-driven segmentation of the arterial wall in intravascular ultrasound images.

Segmentation of arterial wall boundaries from intravascular images is an important problem for many applications in the study of plaque characteristics, mechanical properties of the arterial wall, its 3-D reconstruction, and its measurements such as lumen size, lumen radius, and wall radius. We present a shape-driven approach to segmentation of the arterial wall from intravascular ultrasound images in the rectangular domain. In a properly built shape space using training data, we constrain the lumen and media-adventitia contours to a smooth, closed geometry, which increases the segmentation quality without any tradeoff with a regularizer term. In addition to a shape prior, we utilize an intensity prior through a nonparametric probability-density-based image energy, with global image measurements rather than pointwise measurements used in previous methods. Furthermore, a detection step is included to address the challenges introduced to the segmentation process by side branches and calcifications. All these features greatly enhance our segmentation method. The tests of our algorithm on a large dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.