Intravascular Ultrasound-based Imaging Modalities for Tissue Characterisation.

Atherosclerosis is the leading cause of cardiovascular mortality and morbidity in the developed world. Intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) is a widely used imaging modality providing complementary diagnostic information to angiography regarding the vessel wall of the coronary arteries. IVUS has been used for assessment of ambiguous angiographic lesions, evaluation of new interventional devices and in atherosclerosis progression-regression trials. However, the standard gray-scale IVUS has limited value for the accurate identification of specific plaque components. This limitation has been partially over- come by introduction of new IVUS-based imaging methods such as: virtual histology IVUS, iMAP-IVUS and Integrated Backscatter IVUS. These methods utilise the ultrasound backscatter signal to enable a more detailed characterization of plaque morphology or tissue characterization and to provide insight on the features of vulnerable plaque.