Limitations of the manual pullback in intracoronary ultrasoundimaging

摘要

Intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) may provide highly accurateinformation about the cross-sections of coronary and other vessels. Bypulling the transducer back inside of the vessel, a continuous stream ofcross-sectional data is obtained. However, the images have to beassigned to actual locations and in their proper orientations to allowreliable analyses. In this paper, we focus on the errors introduced bythe catheter pullback, which is still performed mostly manually andunsupervised in clinical routine. However, even in idealised in-vitrostudies several effects occur. We could measure a real pullback speed of1.14±0.34 mm/s where a constant speed of 1 mm was instructed.Absolute orientations and relative twists of the IVUS images were loadedwith RMS errors of 24.030 and 5.010, respectively, between differentpullbacks of the same artery. Especially, these errors have to beconsidered for in-vivo assessments to avoid possible distortions ofvolumetric and other quantifications