A radial filtering scheme applied to intracoronary ultrasound images

Intracoronary ultrasound (ICUS) is a new method to quantify the degree and severity of coronary atherosclerosis. The accurate, precise, and preferably automated detection of lumen-intimal and medial-adventitial boundaries is desirable. However, because of the poor quality of ICUS images, determining accurate boundary estimates is often difficult. Low contrast, artifacts, and low signal-to-noise ratios affect both the quality of the image and the accuracy of boundary defection. Using synthetic image data, the accuracy of two different implementations of a radially oriented edge detection operator were evaluated. The results demonstrate that the application of a radially oriented directional derivative operator in conjunction with a Gaussian blurring function can be used to generate accurate lumen-intimal and medial-adventitial boundary estimates in ICUS images