Edge-preserved Smoothing of Intravascular Ultrasound Image of Coronary Artery by Weighted-separability and Anisotropic Diffusion Filter

Abstract

This paper describes a novel edge-preserved smoothing method with special consideration to an intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) image. An IVUS image, which is commonly used for a diagnosis of acute coronary syndromes (ACS), is very grainy due to heavy speckle noise. The speckle noise prevents a medical doctor from reading the IVUS image. The processing of the image for computer-aided diagnoses (CADs) also becomes difficult. In order to reduce the speckle noise, in this study, we propose a modification of anisotropic diffusion filter in which diffusion strength is locally and adaptively controlled by a weighted separability of an IVUS image. The proposed method not only reduces a speckle noise but also effectively enhances an edge of plaque tissue in an IVUS image. The effectiveness of the proposed method has been verified by the experiments using the real IVUS images.