Virtual Vascular Three-dimensional Reconstruction Based On Intravascular Ultrasound Imaging

Contrast coronary angiography and Intravascular Ultrasound imaging are complementary imaging techniques, and have been widely used in vascular diseases diagnosis. Intravascular ultrasound imaging method can display the internal information of blood vessel, such as the morphology, distribution and plaque type, luminal information. X-ray coronary angiography display vascular spatial geometry information and the vascular lesion can be observed by external morphology of vascular. The fusion of the two imaging modalities combines their merits and overcomes some well-known limitations in the assessment of coronary artery diseases, the reconstructed 3D virtual vessel model can not only display the spatial geometry of blood vessels, but also shows the internal information of interest part of vessels.IVUS image sequences used in previous studies are mainly acquired with mechanical rotating probe, so the fusion process in previous study is complex. Lumen and media-adventitia borders segmentation used in previous study is not ideal. This paper mainly studied on the fusion of electronic phased array system obtained IVUS image sequence, plaque classification images of radio frequency(RF) signal spectrum analysis and CAG image, and improved borders segmentation method.This study includes three main parts: lumen and media-adventitia borders segmentation of intravascular ultrasound, three-dimensional reconstruction of vascular centerline. Finally, the fusion of IVUS, CAG and plaque classification image also means 3D reconstruction of virtual coronary arteries. IVUS images have a very strong background blood noise, makes it difficult to segment IVUS image borders. Preprocessing of IVUS images is indispensible. In this paper, image sharpening and median filtering were introduced to preprocessing the IVUS images and then completed automatic segmentation. There is no guide wire artifacts in the IVUS image used in this paper, so only use vessel centerline as the vessel trajectory, and insert IVUS images to the 3D vessel centerline with the best angle, then smooth the surface of the reconstructed vessels to reconstruct 3D coronary arteries model. Finally, a virtual coronary arteries model was reconstructed with the fusion of plaque classification images and 3D coronary arteries model. The reconstructed 3D virtual coronary arteries model can display the external morphology and vascular lumen internal plague information, and helpful in clinical.