System and Method For Statistical Shape Model Based Segmentation of Intravascular Ultrasound and Optical Coherence Tomography Images

A method for segmenting intravascular images comprising the steps of:

• acquiring a training set of digitized in-vivo intravascular images, each said image comprising a plurality of intensities corresponding to a 2-dimensional grid of pixels;
• forming a training set of boundary contour shapes from said training set of images;
• aligning said shapes in a radial direction and computing a mean shape of the set of shapes;
• subtracting the mean shape from the set of training shapes to form a set of shape variability matrices;
• determining a set of modes and weights wherein a shape model Φ is expressed as a sum of said mean shape and an inner product of the modes and weights according to
• Φ
• ⁡
• (
• w
• )
• =
• Φ
• mean
• +
• ∑
• i
• =
• 1
• k
• ⁢
• w
• i
• ⁢
• U
• i
• ,
• wherein Φmean is said mean shape, wi are the weights, and Ui are the modes;
• providing a digitized in-vivo intravascular testing image;
• and
• segmenting a boundary contour in said testing image by using said shape model to initialize said boundary contour and to drive said segmentation.

A program storage device readable by a computer, tangibly embodying a program of instructions executable by the computer to perform the method steps for segmenting intravascular images, the method comprising the steps of:

• acquiring a series of digitized images acquired from inside a vessel, each said image comprising a plurality of intensities corresponding to a 2-dimensional grid of pixels;
• providing a precomputed set of shapes for modeling contours of vessel wall boundaries, wherein a contour can be expressed as a sum of a mean shape and a inner product of shape modes and shape weights;
• initializing a boundary contour for one of said set of images;
• initializing said shape weights by projecting a contour into said shape modes;
• updating said shape weights from differential equations of said shape weights;
• and
• computing a contour by summing said mean shape and said inner product of shape modes and updated shape weights.