A physics-based intravascular ultrasound image reconstruction method for lumen segmentation

Intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) refers to the medical imaging technique consisting of a miniaturized ultrasound transducer located at the tip of a catheter that can be introduced in the blood vessels providing high-resolution, cross-sectional images of their interior. Current methods for the generation of an IVUS image reconstruction from radio frequency (RF) data do not account for the physics involved in the interaction between the IVUS ultrasound signal and the tissues of the vessel. In this paper, we present a novel method to generate an IVUS image reconstruction based on the use of a scattering model that considers the tissues of the vessel as a distribution of three-dimensional point scatterers. We evaluated the impact of employing the proposed IVUS image reconstruction method in the segmentation of the lumen/wall interface on 40 MHz IVUS data using an existing automatic lumen segmentation method. We compared the results with those obtained using the B-mode reconstruction on 600 randomly selected frames from twelve pullback sequences acquired from rabbit aortas and different arteries of swine. Our results indicate the feasibility of employing the proposed IVUS image reconstruction for the segmentation of the lumen.