Improving Cardiac Phase Extraction in IVUS Studies by Integration of Gating Methods

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

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON BIO-MEDICAL ENGINEERING

IEEE-INST ELECTRICAL ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS INC

Lugar: New York; Año: 2015 vol. 62 p. 2867 - 2877

0018-9294

Coronary intra-vascular ultrasound (IVUS) is a fun-assessment. However, volume-based data retrieved from IVUS studies can be misleading due to the artifacts generated by the cardiac motion, hindering diagnostic and visualization of the vessel condition. Image based gating methods are proposed to overcome this issue avoid- ing additional medical equipment. The different gating methods have shown to be better suited for different scenarios, such as, vessel bifurcations, calcifications or high cardiac frequency. In this work, we propose a fully automatic method to synergically integrate motion signals from different gating methods to improve the cardiac phase estimation. Additionally, we present a local ex- trema identification method that provides a more accurate extraction of a cardiac phase and, also, a scheme for multiple phase extraction mandatory for elastography-type studies. A comparison with three state-of-the-art methods is performed over 61 in-vivo IVUS studies including a wide range of physiological situations. The results show that the proposed strategy offers: (i) a more accurate cardiac phase extraction; (ii) a lower frame oversamplingand/or omission in the extracted phase data (error of 1.492 ± 0.977 heartbeats per study, mean ± SD); (iii) a more accurate and robust heartbeat period detection with a Bland-Altman coefficient of reproducibility (RPC) of 0.23sec, while the second closest method presents a RPC of 0.36 sec.