Correcting motion artifacts of heart for intravascular optical coherence tomography images

Cardiovascular disease is one of the major diseases that cause human death. Atherosclerotic plaque rupture is the main pathogenesis of cardiovascular disease, which leads to coronary heart disease, such as myocardial ischemia, myocardial infarction, internal carotid atherosclerosis and other cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases. Intravascular optical coherence tomography (IVOCT) plays an important role in the diagnosis and treatment of cardiovascular diseases because of its high speed and high resolution. In the current various imaging examination method, clinician evaluate the coronary atherosclerotic plaque structural change by using intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) and IVOCT. IVOCT can provide micron size resolution, which is ten times of IVUS. However, the collected images have motion artifacts during the catheter is pulled back due to the periodic heartbeats. The artifacts would reduce the recognition accuracy of the plaques type and affect the preoperative planning and postoperative follow-up of percutaneous coronary intervention surgery. Based on the comprehensive analysis of the mechanism of motion artifacts and the characteristics of periodic cardiac motion, we designed a new algorithm to correct the rigid motion artifacts of coronary IVOCT images that caused by the heartbeat. This new algorithm can compensate part of translation to suppress of motion artifacts. Compared with the electrocardiogram control method, this algorithm does not need to discard the useful frames in the cardiac cycle, thus ensuring the integrity of the images.