Cardiac Phase Extraction in IVUS Sequences using 1-D Gabor Filters

A main issue in the automatic analysis of Intravascular Ultrasound (IVUS) images is the presence of periodic changes provoked by heart motion during the cardiac cycle. Although the Electrocardiogram (ECG) signal can be used to gate the sequence, few IVUS systems incorporate the ECG- gating option, and the synchronization between them implies several issues. In this paper, we present a fast and robust method to assign a phase in the cardiac cycle to each image in the sequence directly from in vivo clinical IVUS sequences. It is based on the assumption that the vessel wall is significantly brighter than the blood in each IVUS beam. To guarantee stability in this assumption, we use normalized reconstructed images. Then, the wall boundary is extracted for all the radial beams in the sequence and a matrix with these positions is formed. This matrix is filtered using a bank of 1-D Gabor filters centered at the predominant frequency of a given number of windows in the sequence. After filtering, we combine the responses to obtain a unique phase within the cardiac cycle for each image. For this study, we gate the sequence to make the sequence comparable with other ones of the same patient. The method is tested with 12 pull backs of real patients and 15 synthetic tests.