Automatic analysis of bioresorbable vascular scaffolds in intravascular optical coherence tomography images.

The bioresorbable vascular scaffold (BVS) is a new generation of bioresorbable scaffold (BRS) for the treatment of coronary artery disease. A potential challenge of BVS is malapposition, which may possibly lead to late stent thrombosis. It is therefore important to conduct malapposition analysis right after stenting. Since an intravascular optical coherence tomography (IVOCT) image sequence contains thousands of BVS struts, manual analysis is labor intensive and time consuming. Computer-based automatic analysis is an alternative, but faces some difficulties due to the interference of blood artifacts and the uncertainty of the struts number, position and size. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for a struts malapposition analysis that breaks down the problem into two steps. Firstly, struts are detected by a cascade classifier trained by AdaBoost and a region of interest (ROI) is determined for each strut to completely contain it. Then, strut boundaries are segmented within ROIs through dynamic programming. Based on the segmentation result, malapposition analysis is conducted automatically. Tested on 7 pullbacks labeled by an expert, our method correctly detected 91.5% of 5821 BVS struts with 12.1% false positives. The average segmentation Dice coefficient for correctly detected struts was 0.81. The time consumption for a pullback is 15 sec on average. We conclude that our method is accurate and efficient for BVS strut detection and segmentation, and enables automatic BVS malapposition analysis in IVOCT images.