Intracoronary ultrasound catheter motion compensation using the generalized Hough transform

Three-dimensional renderings of a coronary artery can be constructed by stacking a series of contiguous two-dimensional intracoronary ultrasound (ICUS) images obtained during pullback of the transducer. However, visualization and further image processing of the 3-D image are hampered by cardiac cycle-dependent catheter motion. The generalized Hough transform (GHT) was used to automatically propagate medial-adventitial boundary estimates through a sequence of 30 ICUS images. The boundary centroids were then translated to the image center to remove the catheter motion artifact. This automated tracking strategy was compared to previously described boundary defection methods applied to each image in the sequence individually. The results show that the generalized Hough transform can be used to remove or reduce catheter motion artifacts in ICUS image sequences.<>