Plaque Boundary Extraction in Intravascular Ultrasound Image with Use of Fuzzy Inference

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a fuzzy rule-based boundary extraction method for a plaque in an intravascular ultrasound(IVUS) image. In the present method, a plaque boundary to be extracted is piecewise approximated by the polynomials inferred by the fuzzy rules. The coefficients of the polynomials are determined by the weighted least square method using the separability measure obtained from the IVUS image. The proposed method achieves a precise and noise-robust extraction of the plaque with use of a small number of seed points and without any time-consuming iterative processes. The validity and the effectiveness of the proposed method have been confirmed by applying it to the boundary extraction problem of the plaque in the real IVUS image.