Calcified Plaque Detection in IVUS Sequences: Preliminary Results Using Convolutional Nets

Abstract

The manual inspection of intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) images to detect clinically relevant patterns is a difficult and laborious task performed routinely by physicians. In this paper, we present a framework based on convolutional nets for the quick selection of IVUS frames containing arterial calcification, a pattern whose detection plays a vital role in the diagnosis of atherosclerosis. Preliminary experiments on a dataset acquired from eighty patients show that convolutional architectures improve detections of a shallow classifier in terms of F1-measure, precision and recall.