Fuzzy Rule-based Boundary Extraction of Plaque in Intravascular Ultrasound Image

In this paper, we propose a fuzzy rulebased boundary extraction method for a plaque in an intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) image. In the present method, a plaque boundary to be extracted is piecewise approximated by the polynomials inferred by fuzzy rules. The coefficients of the polynomials are determined by the weighted least square method using the separability measure obtained from the IVUS image. The proposed method achieves a precise and noise-robust extraction of the plaque with use of a small number of seed points and without any timeconsuming iterative processes. The validity and the effectiveness of the proposed method have been confirmed by applying it to the boundary extraction problem of the plaque in the IVUS image.