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

Abstract

© 2015 The Authors. 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 μ t and backscattered intensity I 0 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 α-trimmed PL (α-T-PL) was the best overall method. Estimates of μ t were calcified (3.84±0.95 mm -1 ), fibrotic (2.15±1.08 mm -1 ), and lipid (9.99±2.37 mm -1 ), similar to those in the literature, and tissue classification from optical properties alone was promising.