Simulation of intravascular ultrasound images

It is helpful to use simulated intravascular ultrasound(IVUS) images during the validation of image pro- cessing algorithms such as the image segmentation.A method is proposed to simulate IVUS images.To accomplish the simulation of the static IVUS image,it introduces the ringdown and guidewire artifacts to the polar image-formation model,and simulates the fibrous,lipid and calcific content in the atherosclerotic plaque respectively.Utilizing characteristics of the pulsatile artery,the simulation of sequential IVUS images can also be achieved.The method is evaluated via 15 real IVUS images(with 50 experiments on each image),and results demonstrate that it outperforms the traditional polar image-formation model by 56.9% in terms of the correlation coefficient of simulated and real images,and 24.3% in terms of the mutual information of simulated and real images.