Reconstruction of coronary vessels from intravascular ultrasound image sequences based on compensation of the in-plane motion

A three-dimensional vessel model is reconstructed by fusing the cross-sectional information of vascular lumen detected from intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) frames with the spatial geometry of the ultrasonic catheter recovered from a pair of nearly orthogonal X-ray angiograms. This model is closer to the actual morphology than those reconstructed from angiograms or IVUS images alone because of the complementarity between angiography and IVUS in imaging coronary vessels. This study proposes a method to reconstruct the coronary vessels from an electrocardiogram (ECG)-gated IVUS image sequence and simultaneously acquired angiograms. The spatial orientation of each cross-section of the vascular lumen detected from IVUS frames was determined through quantitatively compensating the in-plane rigid motion caused by cardiac cycles. Independent validation of the determination of the IVUS spatial orientation with synthetic data was performed. A limited validity study including the back-projection validation and morphology measures with in vivo image data (five datasets) was performed to evaluate quantitatively the reconstruction accuracy.