Abstract: Intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) imaging, an invasive imaging modality, has been widely
used in clinical diagnosis of vascular diseases. With IVUS, the morphology of the vessel wall and
lumen including atherosclerosis plaques as well as components of plaques can be obtained in vivo.
Automatic or semi-automatic processing and analysis of IVUS images with digital image processing
techniques is important for computer-aided diagnosis and planning of treatment of vascular diseases.
This paper provides a survey on the current process of post-processing of IVUS images. The
improvements of this topic in the last several years are discussed in detail including image
segmentation and tissue characterization, suppression of motion artifacts, vessel reconstruction,
measurement of morphological and hemodynamic parameters, tissue characterization imaging, and
fusion of IVUS with other imaging modalities. The discussion assesses the progress so far, and
outlines some future directions.

Key words: intravascular ultrasound, image segmentation, motion artifact, 3D reconstruction, tissue
characterization imaging, image fusion