Image-based gating of intravascular ultrasound pullback sequences

Intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) sequences recorded in vivo are subject to a wide array of motion artifacts as the majority of these studies are performed within the coronary arteries of a beating heart. To eliminate these artifacts, an electrocardiogram (ECG) signal is typically used to gate (collect) those frames recorded at the points in time associated with a particular fraction of the cardiac cycle. However, this technique may be suboptimal for a number of reasons, among which is the difficulty of determining the optimal fraction at which to gate. This value is generally nonobvious. To circumvent this problem, we introduce a frame-gating method for IVUS pullbacks that mimics ECG (i.e., in the sense that it selects only one frame per cardiac cycle), but will automatically choose the fraction of the cycle that renders the most stable gated frame set. Stability here is gauged by measuring interframe similarity. Our method operates exclusively on the imagery data and does not require ECG or any form of image segmentation or other high-level image analysis. To validate our algorithm, we compare its behavior versus true ECG gating.