Interactive Segmentation of Media-Adventitia Border in IVUS

In this paper, we present an approach for user assisted segmentation of media-adventitia border in IVUS images. This interactive segmentation is performed by a combination of point based soft constraint on object boundary and stroke based regional constraint. The edge based boundary constraint is imposed through searching the shortest path in a three-dimensional graph, derived from a multi-layer image representation. The user points act as attraction points and are treated as soft constraints, rather than hard constraints that the segmented boundary has to pass through the user specified points. User can also use strokes to specify foreground (region of interest). The probabilities of region of interest for each pixel are then calculated and their discontinuity is used to indicate object boundary. This combined approach is formulated as an energy minimization problem that is solved using a shortest path search algorithm. We show that this combined approach allows efficient and effective interactive segmentation, which is demonstrated through identifying media-adventitia border in IVUS images where image artifact, such as acoustic shadow and calcification, are common place. Both qualitative and quantitative analysis are provided based on manual labeled datasets.