Fusion of IVUS and OCT Through Semi-Automatic Registration

The most frequent cause of heart attack and sudden cardiac death is the disruption of plaque build ups in the arteries. Current technologies such as intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) and optical coherence tomography (OCT) image the vessels from inside-out in order to detect plaque deposits as well as other structures. In this work we develop a novel image fusion technique that produces images with greater quality and quantity of information by establishing a correspondence between the two modalities. We employ a three step process using feature extraction, registration, and image fusion. The final results of our algorithm represent an improvement over each modality individually.