A new method for characterization of coronary plaque composition via IVUS images

  • Authors:
  • Arash Taki;Alireza Roodaki;Olivier Pauly;S. K. Setarehdan;Gozde Unal;Nassir Navab

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Computer Aided Medical Procedures, TU Munich, Munich, Germany;Department of Signal Processing and Electronic Systems, Supelec, Gif-sur-Yvette, France;Department of Computer Aided Medical Procedures, TU Munich, Munich, Germany;Control and Intelligent Processing Center of Excellence, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, College of Engineering, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran;Faculty of Engineering and Natural Sciences, Sabanci University, Turkey;Department of Computer Aided Medical Procedures, TU Munich, Munich, Germany

  • Venue:
  • ISBI'09 Proceedings of the Sixth IEEE international conference on Symposium on Biomedical Imaging: From Nano to Macro
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

IVUS-derived virtual histology (VH) permits the assessment of atherosclerotic plaque morphology by using radiofrequency analysis of ultrasound signals. However, it requires the acquisition to be ECG-gated, which is a major limitation of VH. Indeed, its computation can only be performed once per cardiac cycle, which significantly decreases the longitudinal resolution of VH. To overcome this limitation, the introduction of an image-based plaque characterization is of great importance. Current IVUS image processing techniques do not allow adequate identification of the coronary artery plaques. This can be improved by defining appropriate features for the different kinds of plaques. In this paper, a novel feature extraction method based on Run-length algorithm is presented and used for improving the automated characterization of the plaques within the IVUS images. The proposed feature extraction method is applied to 200 IVUS images obtained from five patients. As a result an accuracy rate of 77% was achieved. Comparing this to the accuracy rates of 75% and 71% obtained using co-occurrence and local binary pattern methods respectively indicates the superior performance of the proposed feature extraction method.