A validation protocol for assessing cardiac phase retrieval in Intravascular Ultrasound

A good reliable approach to cardiac triggering is of utmost importance in obtaining accurate quantitative results of atherosclerotic plaque burden from the analysis of IntraVascular UltraSound sequences. Although, in the last years, there has been an increase in research of methods for retrospective gating, there is no general consensus in a validation protocol. In this paper, we propose an objective validation protocol based on the variability of the retrieved cardiac phase and explore the capability of several quality measures for quantifying such variability. We can notice that the residual variance of the regression correlation line is robust against fraction and variabilities as far as one can establish a pair-wise correspondence between candidate and reference.