Intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) image processing for virtual tissue extraction

Subject Areas : biology

Reza Moasherati ¹ (Master's Studen, Department of Medicalradiation, Faculty of Basic Science, Qom Branch, Islamic Azad University, Qom, Iran)
Hasan Tashakori ² (Assistant Professor, Department of Physics, Faculty of Basic Science, Qom Branch, Islamic Azad University, Qom, Iran)

Received: 2022-03-31 Accepted : 2022-06-13 Published : 2022-06-22

Keywords: heart diseases, Virtual tissue, Calcium plaques,  Intravascular ultrasound images (IVUS),

Abstract :

Objective: Cardiovascular diseases have increased significantly in recent decades. One of the heart failures is coronary artery occlusion disease, which is caused by the accumulation of plaques in the coronary artery wall. The main goal of this research is to detect the location of plaques and improve the shadow areas behind calcium plaques using automatic image processing methods.Materials and Methods: In this research, an automatic algorithm was designed and implemented to detect calcium plaques and the shadowed area in intravascular ultrasound images. In this algorithm, the Atsu thresholding method and the active contour method are used to select the detection threshold and reveal the shadow border, respectively. Also, the quality of shaded areas has been improved with histogram adjustment and histogram matching methods. For this purpose, the images of 26 patients with coronary artery occlusion from two selected hospitals of Ardabil city were selected with the cooperation of the doctor.Findings: Using the algorithm implemented for two cases, the presence or absence of plaques in the images and the correctness or incorrectness of all plaques in the images were checked and compared with the results of the doctor's diagnosis.Conclusion: The results of the method used in this research compared to other researches, due to working on a large number of real images of patients and validating the results with the opinion of a cardiologist, caused a more accurate diagnosis of calcium plaques. Also, the results of improving the quality of the images showed that improving the quality of shadows does not give valuable information regarding the determination of the outer border of the vessel and the location of the calcium plaques due to their placement outside the area of the placement of the plaques.

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