Abstract: A usual tool in cardiac disease diagnosis is vessel plaque assessment by analysis of IVUS sequences. Manual detection of lumen-intima, intima-media and media-adventitia vessel borders is the main activity of physicians in the process of plaque quantification. Large variety in vessel border descriptors, as well as, shades, artifacts and blurred response due to ultrasound physical properties troubles automated media-adventitia segmentation. This experimental work presents a solution to such a complex problem. The process blends advanced anisotropic filtering operators and statistic classification techniques, achieving an efficient vessel border modelling strategy. First of all, we introduce the theoretic base of the method. After that, we show the steps of the algorithm, validating the method with statistics that show that the media-adventitia border detection achieves an accuracy in the range of inter-observer variability regardless of plaque nature, vessel geometry and incomplete vessel borders. Finally, we present a little Matlab application to the automatic media-adventitia border.

Abstract: Plaque analysis in IVUS planes needs accurate intima and adventitia models. Large variety in adventitia descriptors difficulties its detection and motivates using a classification strategy for selecting points on the structure. Whatever the set of descriptors used, the selection stage suffers from fake responses due to noise and uncompleted true curves. In order to smooth background noise while strengthening responses, we apply a restricted anisotropic filter that homogenizes grey levels along the image significant structures. Candidate points are extracted by means of a simple semi supervised adaptive classification of the filtered image response to edge and calcium detectors. The final model is obtained by interpolating the former line segments with an anisotropic contour closing technique based on functional extension principles.

Abstract: Creases are a type of ridge/valley structures that can be characterized by local conditions. Therefore, creaseness refers to local ridgeness and valleyness. The curvature K of the level curves and the mean curvature kM of the level surfaces are good measures of creaseness for 2-d and 3-d images, respectively. However, the way they are computed gives rise to discontinuities, reducing their usefulness in many applications. We propose a new creaseness measure, based on these curvatures, that avoids the discontinuities. We demonstrate its usefulness in the registration of CT and MR brain volumes, from the same patient, by searching the maximum in the correlation of their creaseness responses (ridgeness from the CT and valleyness from the MR). Due to the high dimensionality of the space of transforms, the search is performed by a hierarchical approach combined with an optimization method at each level of the hierarchy