Fully automated gating of optical coherence tomography data

Intra-coronary optical coherence tomography (OCT) provides ultra-high resolution imaging of coronary vessel wall structures. However, during image acquisition the OCT catheter is affected by cardiac motion. These motioninduced artifacts not only complicate longitudinal image reconstructions, it results in a saw-tooth shaped appearance of the coronary vessel wall, but more importantly it affects the accuracy of quantitative analysis (QOCT). To overcome this problem we propose to perform image-based gating applying a genetic algorithm (GA) that automatically selects a subset of OCT cross-sections that are relatively unaffected by the catheter displacement during the cardiac cycle. The gated subset contains cross-sections (frames) acquired in the near end-diastolic phase, during which the heart is relatively motionless. We evaluated the GA in a comparison test with a different gating method (Simulated Annealing (SA)) and with manual frame selection (MFS) and found promising results.