Segmentation of Calcification Regions in Intravascular Ultrasound Images by Adaptive Thresholding

Abstract

An innovative application of adaptive thresholding is used for calcification regions detection in intravascular ultrasound images. A priori knowledge about the acoustic shadow that usually follows the calcification regions is used as discriminant of other bright regions of the image. Tests were carried out with 20 in vivo coronary artery images obtained from different patients. This proposed algorithm presented specificity of 88% and sensitivity of 84%. A ROC curve, whose AUC was equal to 0.87, was plotted for evaluation of the algorithm performance