Intravascular ultrasound in the coronary arteries

With technical improvements in catheter designs, intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) imaging of coronary arteries has become a routine procedure in most cardiac catheterization laboratories. In clinical practice, IVUS imaging of the coronary arteries is commonly performed to answer specific clinical questions such as the evaluation of an indeterminate narrowing of the left main coronary artery. In recent years, IVUS is also being performed as an endpoint for drug treatment trials in the assessment of atherosclerosis progression and/or regression. In this review we will focus on how validation studies of coronary IVUS systems have advanced our ability to use this powerful imaging tool and understand IVUS images, how acoustic and geometric factors affect proposed image processing tools and illustrate some current clinical uses of coronary IVUS.