Parameter estimation of atherosclerotic tissue optical properties from three-dimensional intravascular optical coherence tomography.

We developed robust, three-dimensional methods, as opposed to traditional A-line analysis, for estimating the optical properties of calcified, fibrotic, and lipid atherosclerotic plaques from in vivo coronary artery intravascular optical coherence tomography clinical pullbacks. We estimated attenuation [Formula: see text] and backscattered intensity [Formula: see text] from small volumes of interest annotated by experts in 35 pullbacks. Some results were as follows: noise reduction filtering was desirable, parallel line (PL) methods outperformed individual line methods, root mean square error was the best goodness-of-fit, and [Formula: see text]-trimmed PL ([Formula: see text]-T-PL) was the best overall method. Estimates of [Formula: see text] were calcified ([Formula: see text]), fibrotic ([Formula: see text]), and lipid ([Formula: see text]), similar to those in the literature, and tissue classification from optical properties alone was promising.