Abstract
The acute coronary syndrome (ACS) is caused by a blood clot formed on a ruptured plaque. The risk factor of the ruptured plaque is strongly related to both the thickness of fibrous cap and the lipid distribution. Therefore, a noninvasively diagnostic system is required in clinical practice to identify the tissue characterization of the arteriosclerosis with microscale. In this paper, we propose a tomographically visualizing technique of tissue characterization using "Attenuation, Reflection and Variance OCT" (ARV-OCT). The present system can calculate the ratio of lipid and fibrous using optical characteristic quantities from OCT images i.e. attenuation, reflection and variance. ARV-OCT was ex vivo applied to atherosclerotic plaques of rabbit artery. As a result, the proposed technique is able to classify fibrous and lipid tissue from an OCT image of the aorta. ARV-OCT is one of clinical diagnostic criteria of the tissue characterization in atheroscherotic plaques.
