PT Journal
AU Marina Alberti
   Simone Balocco
   Xavier Carrillo
   Josefina Mauri
   Petia Radeva
TI Automatic non-rigid temporal alignment of IVUS sequences: method and quantitative validation
SO Ultrasound in Medicine and Biology
JI UMB
PY 2013
BP 1698-712
VL 39
IS 9
DI 10.1016/j.ultrasmedbio.2013.03.005
DE Intravascular ultrasound; Dynamic time warping; Non-rigid alignment; Sequence matching; Partial overlapping strategy
AB Clinical studies on atherosclerosis regression/progression performed by intravascular ultrasound analysis would benefit from accurate alignment of sequences of the same patient before and after clinical interventions and at follow-up. In this article, a methodology for automatic alignment of intravascular ultrasound sequences based on the dynamic time warping technique is proposed. The non-rigid alignment is adapted to the specific task by applying it to multidimensional signals describing the morphologic content of the vessel. Moreover, dynamic time warping is embedded into a framework comprising a strategy to address partial overlapping between acquisitions and a term that regularizes non-physiologic temporal compression/expansion of the sequences. Extensive validation is performed on both synthetic and in vivo data. The proposed method reaches alignment errors of approximately 0.43 mm for pairs of sequences acquired during the same intervention phase and 0.77 mm for pairs of sequences acquired at successive intervention stages.
ER