Wei Wu, Merjulah Roby, Akshat Banga, Usama Oguz, Vinay Kumar Gadamidi, Charu Hasini Vasa, Shijia Zhao, Vineeth Dasari, Anjani Kumar Thota, Sartaj Tanweer, Changkye Lee, Ghassan Kassab, Yiannis Chatzizisis
Journal of Medical Imaging, Vol. 11, Issue 01, 014004, (January 2024) https://doi.org/10.1117/1.JMI.11.1.014004
TOPICS: Image segmentation, Optical coherence tomography, 3D modeling, Optical coherence, Arteries, Image processing, 3D image processing, Tunable filters, Education and training, Shadows
Purpose
Optical coherence tomography has emerged as an important intracoronary imaging technique for coronary artery disease diagnosis as it produces high-resolution cross-sectional images of luminal and plaque morphology. Precise and fast lumen segmentation is essential for efficient OCT morphometric analysis. However, due to the presence of various image artifacts, including side branches, luminal blood artifacts, and complicated lesions, this remains a challenging task.
Approach
Our research study proposes a rapid automatic segmentation method that utilizes nonuniform rational B-spline to connect limited pixel points and identify the edges of the OCT lumen. The proposed method suppresses image noise and accurately extracts the lumen border with a high correlation to ground truth images based on the area, minimal diameter, and maximal diameter.
Results
We evaluated the method using 3300 OCT frames from 10 patients and found that it achieved favorable results. The average time taken for automatic segmentation by the proposed method is 0.17 s per frame. Additionally, the proposed method includes seamless vessel reconstruction following the lumen segmentation.
Conclusions
The developed automated system provides an accurate, efficient, robust, and user-friendly platform for coronary lumen segmentation and reconstruction, which can pave the way for improved assessment of the coronary artery lumen morphology.