Using reconstructed IVUS images for coronary plaque classification

Coronary plaque rupture is one of the principal causes of sudden death in western societies. Reliable diagnostic of the different plaque types are of great interest for the medical community the predicting their evolution and applying an effective treatment. To achieve this, a tissue classification must be performed. Intravascular Ultrasound (IVUS) represents a technique to explore the vessel walls and to observe its histological properties. In this paper, a method to reconstruct IVUS images from the raw Radio Frequency (RF) data coming from ultrasound catheter is proposed. This framework offers a normalization scheme to compare accurately different patient studies. The automatic tissue classification is based on texture analysis and Adapting Boosting (Adaboost) learning technique combined with Error Correcting Output Codes (ECOC). In this study, 9 in-vivo cases are reconstructed with 7 different parameter set. This method improves the classification rate based on images, yielding a 91% of well-detected tissue using the best parameter set. It also reduces the inter-patient variability compared with the analysis of DICOM images, which are obtained from the commercial equipment.