The edge detection of intravascular ultrasound(IVUS) image has great significance in the diagnosis and treatment of the coronary artery disease. In this paper

a new method used for automatically detecting the intima and adventitia edge of IVUS image is presented.The method bases on active contour model

the contrast and Rayleigh distribution characteristics of IVUS image

effectively uses dynamic programming and heuristic graph searching

and automatically detects the intima and adventitia edge of IVUS image with the different cost functions.Experiments show that

compared with the former method of edge detection

our method is algorithmically simple

statistically accurate

reproducible and robust in sequential IVUS frames

and the algorithm is a kind of global optimal one.