Tissue characterisation of coronary plaques using sparse feature vectors

Electronics Letters

46

7

484-486

T. Azetsu, E. Uchino, S. Furukawa, N. Suetake, T. Hiro, M. Matsuzaki

In a diagnosis of the acute coronary syndrome (ACS), the tissue characterization of coronary plaque is very important. This paper proposes a novel method for the tissue characterization of coronary plaque by using a sparse coding. In the proposed method, an intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) backscattered radiofrequency (RF) signal is coded by the sparse coding, and the code patterns are used for the classification of a target tissue. Experiments are performed to classify the tissues of coronary plaque into fibrous or lipid tissue by using those RF signals, which are observed from a rabbit coronary artery. The effectiveness of the proposed method has been verified by the comparative studies with the conventional integrated backscatter (IB) analysis.