Coronary Plaque Characterization From Optical Coherence Tomography Imaging With a Two-Pathway Cascade Convolutional Neural Network Architecture

Frontiers in Cardiovascular Medicine

Biao Xu¹  Yifan Yin²  Chunliu He²  Zhiyong Li³ 

[1] Department of Cardiology, Nanjing Drum Tower Hospital, Nanjing, China;School of Biological Science and Medical Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing, China;School of Biological Science and Medical Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing, China;School of Mechanical, Medical, and Process Engineering, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, QLD, Australia;

关键词: optical coherence tomography;    convolutional neural network;    plaque characterization;    cascaded structure;    two-pathway architecture;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fcvm.2021.670502

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

Background: The morphological structure and tissue composition of a coronary atherosclerotic plaque determine its stability, which can be assessed by intravascular optical coherence tomography (OCT) imaging. However, plaque characterization relies on the interpretation of large datasets by well-trained observers. This study aims to develop a convolutional neural network (CNN) method to automatically extract tissue features from OCT images to characterize the main components of a coronary atherosclerotic plaque (fibrous, lipid, and calcification). The method is based on a novel CNN architecture called TwopathCNN, which is utilized in a cascaded structure. According to the evaluation, this proposed method is effective and robust in the characterization of coronary plaque composition from in vivo OCT imaging. On average, the method achieves 0.86 in F1-score and 0.88 in accuracy. The TwopathCNN architecture and cascaded structure show significant improvement in performance (p < 0.05). CNN with cascaded structure can greatly improve the performance of characterization compared to the conventional CNN methods and machine learning methods. This method has a higher efficiency, which may be proven to be a promising diagnostic tool in the detection of coronary plaques.

【 授权许可】

CC BY