Coronary Plaque Boundary Enhancement in IVUS Image by Using a Modified Perona-Malik Diffusion Filter

We propose a modified Perona-Malik diffusion (PMD) filter to enhance a coronary plaque boundary by considering the conditions peculiar to an intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) image. The IVUS image is commonly used for a diagnosis of acute coronary syndrome (ACS). The IVUS image is however very grainy...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: S. Anam, E. Uchino, N. Suetake
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Hindawi Limited 2014-01-01
Series:International Journal of Biomedical Imaging
Online Access:http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2014/740627
Description
Summary:We propose a modified Perona-Malik diffusion (PMD) filter to enhance a coronary plaque boundary by considering the conditions peculiar to an intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) image. The IVUS image is commonly used for a diagnosis of acute coronary syndrome (ACS). The IVUS image is however very grainy due to heavy speckle noise. When the normal PMD filter is applied for speckle noise reduction in the IVUS image, the coronary plaque boundary becomes vague. For this problem, we propose a modified PMD filter which is designed in special reference to the coronary plaque boundary detection. It can then not only reduce the speckle noise but also enhance clearly the coronary plaque boundary. After applying the modified PMD filter to the IVUS image, the coronary plaque boundaries are successfully detected further by applying the Takagi-Sugeno fuzzy model. The accuracy of the proposed method has been confirmed numerically by the experiments.
ISSN:1687-4188
1687-4196