Research On 3D Reconstruction Of Vessels From Intravascular OCT Image Sequences

Intravascular optical coherence tomography(IV-OCT), a high-resolution interventional imaging technology, is of paramount importance for clinical diagnosis,prognosis and treatment planning of coronary artery diseases.IV-OCT imaging presents 2D tomographic images of the vascular cross-sections while the 3D spatial morphology of the vessel is not available. Research on 3D reconstruction of coronary vessels from IV-OCT pullback image sequences is addressed in this dissertation. A 3D vessel model is recovered by fusing the cross-sectional information of vessel lumen and wall detected from IV-OCT studies with the spatial geometry of the vessel and imaging catheter pullback trajectory obtained from simultaneously acquired X-ray angiograms(XA). Five steps are included: First, motion artifacts caused by cardiac cycles are compensated; Second, the inner and outer borders of the vessel wall are detected from each IV-OCT slice; Three, the pullback trajectory of the IV-OCT imaging catheter is reconstructed based on the volumetric information of a pair of nearly orthogonal XA acquired at the origin of the pullback path; Four, IV-OCT frames are correctly aligned along the related position in the acquisition order; Finally,the vessel wall surface is reconstructed with the NURBS surface fitting technique. The proposed method has been validated with clinically acquired image data, and its performance was analyzed and discussed according to validation results.