Approaches to segment stent area from Intravascular Optical Coherence Tomography

Abstract Introduction Cardiovascular diseases (CVD) have been the focus of research in recent years due to its high mortality rate. It is estimated that 17.5 million people died of CVD in 2012, from which 7.4 million were due to coronary heart disease (CHD). In order to monitor CHD patients and avoid waste of specialists' time, this study proposes the development of a method that segments the area contained by stent struts from Frequency Domain Intravascular Optical Coherence Tomography (the latest technology to view vessels internally) of coronary arteries. Methods The novelty of this study is to find areas comprised by stent struts using two optimal strategies that are robust even with false positives and false negatives detection of stent struts. The first one uses an ellipse fitting algorithm and the other uses a cylinder fitting algorithm. Results Both strategies obtained similar accuracy results close to 98% of true positives, but the cylinder technique showed a run time of at least 50 times higher than the ellipse technique. Conclusion The methods were executed on 443 images with different characteristics showing robustness and usefulness in the medical area.