Because of shortcomings of the existing contour detection of the intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) image, an improved method used for automatically detecting the lumen and mediaadventitia contours of sequential IVUS images was presented. First, the speckle noise of the image was effectively removed in the contourlet transform domain. Then, the initial lumen and mediaadventitia contours of the image were estimated according to physical properties and structural information of sequential images. Finally, using the active contour model and the grey level gradient of the denoised image, and according to the dynamic programming technique, the lumen and mediaadventitia contours of the image were automatically detected. Experimental results showed that the proposed method is algorithmically simple, statistically accurate, and has clinical value.