Validation of parameter estimation methods for determining optical properties of atherosclerotic tissues in intravascular OCT

摘要

In this paper we present a new process for assessing optical properties of tissues from 3D pullbacks, the standard clinical acquisition method for iOCT data. Our method analyzes a volume of interest (VOI) consisting of about 100 A-lines spread across the angle of rotation (\u3b8) and along the artery, z. The new 3D method uses catheter correction, baseline removal, speckle noise reduction, alignment of A-line sequences, and robust estimation. We compare results to those from a more standard, gold standard stationary acquisition where many image frames are averaged to reduce noise. To do these studies in a controlled fashion, we use a realistic optical artery phantom containing of multiple tissue types. Precision and accuracy for 3D pullback analysis are reported. Our results indicate that when implementing the process on a stationary acquisition dataset, the uncertainty improves at each stage while the uncertainty is reduced. When comparing stationary acquisition dataset to pullback dataset, the values were as follows: calcium: 3.8\ub11.09mm -1 in stationary and 3.9\ub11.2 mm-1 in a pullback; lipid: 11.025\ub10.417 mm-1 in stationary and 11.27\ub10.25 mm-1 in pullback; fibrous: 6.08\ub11.337 mm-1 in stationary and 5.58\ub12.0 mm-1. These results indicates that the process presented in this paper introduce minimal bias and only a small change in uncertainty when comparing a stationary and pullback dataset, thus paves the way to a highly accurate clinical plaque type discrimination, enabling automatic classification.