Artery wall extraction from intravascular oct images

Abstract

In this article, we present a new method to extract internal and external borders (intimal-adventitial) of arteries from Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) images. The method is based on A-scan segmentation. First, the distribution of the grey level values on every A-scan is analyzed separately using a sliding window to approximate a single-lobe distribution. Our hypothesis is that the position of the arterial tissue corresponds to the window which exhibits the largest single-lobe distribution. Once all the tissue is extracted from the image, every segmented A-scan position is corrected using a block of neighbouring segmented A-scans. Experimental results show that the proposed method is accurate and robust to extract arterial tissue. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.