Suppression of Cardiac Motion Artifacts in Sequential Intracoronary Optical Coherence Images

摘要

Background: Intracoronary optical coherence tomography (IC-OCT), an interventional imaging modality, has been used in clinical diagnosis of cardiac vessel diseases for decades. Motion artifacts caused by cardiac motion and pulsatile blood flow always hamper the visualization of sequential IC-OCT images acquired by continuously pulling back the imaging catheter within the vascular lumen. Method: Suppression of cardiac motion artifacts in an IC-OCT image sequence was addressed in this study. A signal implying cardiac phases was detected based on the cyclic variation of gray-scale features or the location of the lumen contour centroid along the overall image sequence. The local extrema of the signal were detected according to which the gating frames were selected. Result: The experimental results of clinically acquired in vivo data show that the average inter-frame difference of the gated subsequence is obviously lower than the original one. The visualization of longitudinal cuts is improved significantly. Conclusion: Lumen-contour based scheme is more suitable for those image sequences where the variation of intensity featuresis not apparent than the intensity-based one.