In 2010 cardiovascular disease (CVD) caused 33% of the total deaths in Brazil. Intravascular Optical Coherent Tomography (IOCT) is an imaging technology that provides in vivo detection and monitoring of the progression of coronary heart disease. IOCT exam allows more accurate diagnoses; nonetheless, the set of quantitative methods applied to IOCT in the literature is small compared to other related modalities. Therefore, the proposed approach presents a lumen segmentation method, based on a combination of Fuzzy Connectedness, with multiple affinity functions, and Morphological Operations. The affinity functions used in this work are: (I) classical, (II) Dynamic weights (III) Bhattacharyya. The latter is based on the Bhattacharyya coefficient, commonly used for speckle tracking. Firstly, unwanted features of the image are attenuated. Then, vessel-wall information is obtained using Fuzzy Connectedness and dynamic binarization process. Finally, morphological operations are performed to improve the segmented lumen. To evaluate the proposed method, a set of 130 images from humans, pigs and rabbits were segmented and compared to their corresponding gold standard made by experts. An average of true positive (TP%) = 98.08, and false positive (FP%) = 2.34 were obtained. Hence, the use of the proposed method is suggested since it has yielded higher efficiency than previously published studies.
Intravascular Optical Coherent Tomography (IOCT); Segmentation; Fuzzy connectedness; Bhattacharyya; Morphological operations
