Decomposition of IVUS Study in Cardiac Phases

G. D. MASO TALOU; I. LARRABIDE; P. A. LEMOS; P. J. BLANCO; R. A. FEIJÓO

Conferencia; Biomedical Signal Analysis Conference; 2014

Intra-vascular ultrasound (IVUS) is a fundamental imaging technique to perform atherosclerotic plaque assessment. However, volume-based data retrieved from IVUS studies can be misleading due to the non-negligible effect introduced by cardiac motion. In this work, we propose a fully automatic gating method to decompose IVUS studies into cardiac phases, deriving different subsets of IVUS images each of which eludes the cardiac motion by being mapped to a single cardiac phase. The main contributions of the method are: the definition of an image feature that measures cardiac motion on a frame independently from adjacent frames; and an identification scheme for extremal values in the motion signal based on the progressive incorporation of harmonic components. As result, the mean frequency and periods of the heartbeats detected with our approach shows a strong agreement with those manually detected via Rpeak identification from the ECG signal. The proposed temporal decomposition permits more accurate and time consistent reconstructions, filtering and measurements on the IVUS study.