Tissue Characterization of Coronary Plaque Using Sparse Coding and Neighboring Features

Abstract

The major cause of acute coronary syndrome (ACS) is a blood clot generated by a rupture of unstable plaque in the coronary artery. Therefore, in a diagnosis of the ACS, it becomes very important to accurately distinguish the stable plaque and the unstable one. Several methods to classify the tissue of the coronary plaque have been proposed so far. They are not always useful however due to the performance limitations of the features selected by each method. In this study, we propose a new method to apply a sparse coding to the tissue characterization for improving its accuracy. The effectiveness of the proposed method has been verified by comparing the characterization results by the proposed method with those by the conventional methods for the real intravascular ultrasound data obtained from the human coronary arteries.