Atherosclerosis plaque tissue classification using self-attention-based conditional variational auto-encoder generative adversarial network using OCT plaque image

Biomed Tech (Berl). 2023 Jul 3;68(6):633-649. doi: 10.1515/bmt-2022-0286. Print 2023 Dec 15.

Abstract

Adults with coronary artery disease often have atherosclerosis, this is defined as the accumulation of plaque in the tissues of the arterial wall. Cardiologists utilize optical coherence tomography (OCT), a light-based imaging method, to examine the layers of intracoronary tissue along pathological formations, such as plaque accumulation. Intracoronary cross-sectional images produced by state-of-the-art catheter-based imaging scheme have 10-15 µm high resolution. Nevertheless, interpretation of the obtained images depends on the operator, which takes a lot of time and is exceedingly error-prone from one observer to another. OCT image post-processing that automatically and accurately tags coronary plaques can help the technique become more widely used and lower the diagnostic error rate. To overcome these problems, Atherosclerosis plaque tissue classification using Self-Attention-Based Conditional Variational Auto-Encoder Generative Adversarial Network (APC-OCTPI-SACVAGAN) is proposed which classifies the Atherosclerosis plaque images as Fibro calcific plaque, Fibro atheroma, Thrombus, Fibrous plaque and Micro-vessel. The proposed APC-OCTPI-SACVAGAN technique is executed in MATLAB. The efficiency of proposed APC-OCTPI-SACVAGAN method attains 16.19 %, 17.93 %, 19.81 % and 1.57 % higher accuracy; 16.92 %, 11.54 %, 5.29 % and 1.946 % higher Area under curve; and 28.06 %, 25.32 %, 32.19 % and 39.185 % lower computational time comparing to the existing methods respectively.

Keywords: atherosclerosis plaque tissue classification; contrast limited adaptive histogram equalization method; coronary artery; expectation maximization with principal component analysis; optical coherence tomography.

MeSH terms

  • Adult
  • Atherosclerosis* / pathology
  • Coronary Artery Disease*
  • Coronary Vessels
  • Humans
  • Plaque, Atherosclerotic* / diagnostic imaging
  • Plaque, Atherosclerotic* / pathology
  • Tomography, Optical Coherence / methods