Intravascular ultrasound speckle statistics

A ridge based speckles segmentation algorithm is proposed for segmenting speckle images and its application in IVUS (intravascular ultrasound) images is studied. An IVUS image may be treated as a height map with ridges corresponding to the center of the speckles. The author proposes a ridge detection algorithm based on the calculation of the maximum ascent direction. The algorithm's running time is linear to the AOI (area of interest). It is robust with changes of the AOI and insensitive to changes of the image brightness and contrast. The output of the algorithm is a set of ridge pixels assembled in a natural hierarchy order. A group of characteristic parameters may be evaluated for the detected ridge. The parameters vary distinctly with different textures of the ultrasound speckles. This method may aid further segmentation of the IVUS image.