Investigations of Shadows in Intravascular Ultrasound Images

Abstract

Cardiovascular disease serves as the leading cause of death worldwide. Intravascular Ultrasound images (IVUS) is a useful guide for medical practitioners to identify the vascular status of coronary arteries in human beings. IVUS is a unique intracoronary imaging modality that is used as an adjunct to angioplasty to view vessel structures using a catheter with high resolutions. Accurate diagnosis of atherosclerotic coronary artery stenosis largely depends on IVUS image quality. The presence of coherent sources during IVUS acquisition generates speckle noise. Speckle noise degrades the image quality and obstructs the clear view of the artery. Denoising aims to remove speckle noise while preserving edges and other important features. Accordingly, reduction in speckle-noise serves as an important newlinepreprocessing step for IVUS image analysis and segmentation of arterial borders. As it is, challenging to denoise the IVUS images with complex lesions i.e. calcified arc gt 180°, the research work done considers, the denoising performance for different denoising filters not only for the healthy IVUS images but also for complex lesions. newlineThe results depict that curvelet based non-local means (CNLM) denoising filter newlineOut performs the others in terms of PSNR and FSIM for speckle noise suppression for complex IVUS images while preserving the essential edge and feature details for better image visualization and diagnosis. newline newline