Automatic IVUS media-adventitia border extraction using double interface graph cut segmentation

Abstract

We present a fully automatic segmentation method to extract media-adventitia border in IVUS images. Segmentation in IVUS has shown to be an intricate process due to relatively low contrast and various forms of interferences and artifacts caused by, for example, calcification and acoustic shadow. Graph cut based methods often require careful manual initialization and produces in consistent tracing of the border. We use a double interface automatic graph cut technique to prevent the extraction of media-adventitia border from being distracted by those image features. Novel cost functions are derived from using a combination of complementary texture features. Comparative studies on manual labeled data show promising performance of the proposed method.