Estimating coronary artery lumen area with optimization-based contour detection

A modified optimization-based contour detection method was presented to compute the lumen area of the coronary artery from intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) video images. First, the search range for the artery inner wall was determined based on the continuity of IVUS video frames. Next, the internal and external energy were calculated to describe the smoothness of the arterial wall and the grayscale variation of ultrasound images, respectively. Here, a novel form of the external energy which combines the gradient and variance of the intensity of image in the radial direction was used. Finally, the minimal energy path based on the optimum contour of the artery wall was obtained using circular dynamic programming (DP). By the comparison with the typical DP procedure using the traditional external energy form, based only on the image gradient, the reliability of this modified method is considerably improved in the measurement of coronary artery lumen area.