title: Coronary Plaque Boundary Enhancement in IVUS Image by Using a Modified Perona-Malik Diffusion Filter.
abstract: We propose a modified Perona-Malik diffusion (PMD) filter to enhance a coronary plaque boundary by considering the conditions peculiar to an intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) image. The IVUS image is commonly used for a diagnosis of acute coronary syndrome (ACS). The IVUS image is however very grainy due to heavy speckle noise. When the normal PMD filter is applied for speckle noise reduction in the IVUS image, the coronary plaque boundary becomes vague. For this problem, we propose a modified PMD filter which is designed in special reference to the coronary plaque boundary detection. It can then not only reduce the speckle noise but also enhance clearly the coronary plaque boundary. After applying the modified PMD filter to the IVUS image, the coronary plaque boundaries are successfully detected further by applying the Takagi-Sugeno fuzzy model. The accuracy of the proposed method has been confirmed numerically by the experiments.
authors.affiliation: Graduate School of Science and Engineering, Yamaguchi University, Yamaguchi 753-8512, Japan ; Mathematics Department, University of Brawijaya, Malang 65145, Indonesia.
authors.forename: S
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Anam
authors.affiliation: Graduate School of Science and Engineering, Yamaguchi University, Yamaguchi 753-8512, Japan ; Fuzzy Logic Systems Institute, Iizuka 820-0067, Japan.
authors.forename: E
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Uchino
authors.affiliation: Graduate School of Science and Engineering, Yamaguchi University, Yamaguchi 753-8512, Japan.
authors.forename: N
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Suetake