ActiveVessel: a new multimedia workstation for intravascular ultrasound and angiography fusion

ActiveVessel is a new multimedia workstation which enables the visualization, acquisition and handling of both image modalities, on- and offline. It enables DICOM v3.0 decompression and browsing, video acquisition, reproduction and storage for intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) and angiograms with their corresponding ECG, automatic catheter segmentation in angiography images (using fast marching algorithm), BSpline models definition for vessel layers on IVUS images sequence and an extensively validated tool to fuse information. This approach defines the correspondence of every IVUS image with its correspondent point in the angiograms and vice versa. The 3D reconstruction of the IVUS catheter/vessel enables real distance measurements as well as three-dimensional visualization showing vessel tortuosity in the space.