Contour detection of atherosclerotic plaques in IVUS images using ellipse template matching and particle swarm optimization

It is valuable for diagnosis of atherosclerosis to detect lumen and media-adventitia contours in intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) images of atherosclerotic plaques. In this paper, a method for contour detection of plaques is proposed utilizing the prior knowledge of elliptic geometry of plaques. Contours are initialized as ellipses by using ellipse template matching, where a matching function is maximized by particle swarm optimization. Then the contours are refined by boundary vector field snakes. The method was evaluated via 88 in vivo images from 21 patients. It outperformed a state-of-the-art method by 3.8 pixels and 4.8% in terms of the mean distance error and relative mean distance error, respectively.