Open Access
4 October 2019 Automated A-line coronary plaque classification of intravascular optical coherence tomography images using handcrafted features and large datasets
David S. Prabhu, Hiram G. Bezerra, Chaitanya Kolluru, Yazan Gharaibeh, Emile Mehanna, Hao Wu, David L. Wilson
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Abstract

We developed machine learning methods to identify fibrolipidic and fibrocalcific A-lines in intravascular optical coherence tomography (IVOCT) images using a comprehensive set of handcrafted features. We incorporated features developed in previous studies (e.g., optical attenuation and A-line peaks). In addition, we included vascular lumen morphology and three-dimensional (3-D) digital edge and texture features. Classification methods were developed using expansive datasets (∼7000  images), consisting of both clinical in-vivo images and an ex-vivo dataset, which was validated using 3-D cryo-imaging/histology. Conditional random field was used to perform 3-D classification noise cleaning of classification results. We tested various multiclass approaches, classifiers, and feature selection schemes and found that a three-class support vector machine with minimal-redundancy-maximal-relevance feature selection gave the best performance. We found that inclusion of our morphological and 3-D features improved overall classification accuracy. On a held-out test set consisting of >1700 images, we obtained an overall accuracy of 81.58%, with the following (sensitivity/specificity) for each class: other (81.43/89.59), fibrolipidic (94.48/87.32), and fibrocalcific (74.82/95.28). The en-face views of classification results showed that automated classification easily captured the preponderance of a disease segment (e.g., a calcified segment had large regions of fibrocalcific classifications). Finally, we demonstrated proof-of-concept for streamlining A-line classification output with existing fibrolipidic and fibrocalcific boundary segmentation methods, to enable fully automated plaque quantification. The results suggest that our classification approach is a viable step toward fully automated IVOCT plaque classification and segmentation for live-time treatment planning and for offline assessment of drug and biologic therapeutics.

CC BY: © The Authors. Published by SPIE under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported License. Distribution or reproduction of this work in whole or in part requires full attribution of the original publication, including its DOI.
David S. Prabhu, Hiram G. Bezerra, Chaitanya Kolluru, Yazan Gharaibeh, Emile Mehanna, Hao Wu, and David L. Wilson "Automated A-line coronary plaque classification of intravascular optical coherence tomography images using handcrafted features and large datasets," Journal of Biomedical Optics 24(10), 106002 (4 October 2019). https://doi.org/10.1117/1.JBO.24.10.106002
Received: 23 May 2019; Accepted: 20 August 2019; Published: 4 October 2019
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CITATIONS
Cited by 26 scholarly publications.
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KEYWORDS
Feature selection

Image classification

Image segmentation

Tissues

In vivo imaging

Signal attenuation

Tissue optics

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