The segmentation of the intracoronary optical coherence tomography (OCT) images is the basis of the plaque recognition, and it is important to the following plaque feature analysis, vulnerable plaque recognition and further coronary disease aided diagnosis. This paper proposes an algorithm about multi region plaque segmentation based on kernel graph cuts model that realizes accurate segmentation of fibrous, calcium and lipid pool plaques in coronary OCT image, while boundary information has been well reserved. We segmented 20 coronary images with typical plaques in our experiment, and compared the plaque regions segmented by this algorithm to the plaque regions obtained by doctor's manual segmentation. The results showed that our algorithm is accurate to segment the plaque regions. This work has demonstrated that it can be used for reducing doctors' working time on segmenting plaque significantly, reduce subjectivity and differences between different doctors, assist clinician's diagnosis and treatment of coronary artery disease.
Lung nodules are the main manifestation of early lung cancer. So accurate detection of lung nodules is of great significance for early diagnosis and treatment of lung cancer. However, the rapid and accurate detection of pulmonary nodules is a challenging task due to the complex background, large detection range of pulmonary computed tomography (CT) images and the different sizes and shapes of pulmonary nodules. Therefore, this paper proposes a multi-scale feature fusion algorithm for the automatic detection of pulmonary nodules to achieve accurate detection of pulmonary nodules. Firstly, a three-layer modular lung nodule detection model was designed on the deep convolutional network (VGG16) for large-scale image recognition. The first-tier module of the network is used to extract the features of pulmonary nodules in CT images and roughly estimate the location of pulmonary nodules. Then the second-tier module of the network is used to fuse multi-scale image features to further enhance the details of pulmonary nodules. The third-tier module of the network was fused to analyze the features of the first-tier and the second-tier module of the network, and the candidate box of pulmonary nodules in multi-scale was obtained. Finally, the candidate box of pulmonary nodules under multi-scale was analyzed with the method of non-maximum suppression, and the final location of pulmonary nodules was obtained. The algorithm is validated by the data of pulmonary nodules on LIDC-IDRI common data set. The average detection accuracy is 90.9%.
ST segment morphology is closely related to cardiovascular disease. It is used not only for characterizing different diseases, but also for predicting the severity of the disease. However, the short duration, low energy, variable morphology and interference from various noises make ST segment morphology classification a difficult task. In this paper, we address the problems of single feature extraction and low classification accuracy of ST segment morphology classification, and use the gradient of ST surface to improve the accuracy of ST segment morphology multi-classification. In this paper, we identify five ST segment morphologies: normal, upward-sloping elevation, arch-back elevation, horizontal depression, and arch-back depression. Firstly, we select an ST segment candidate segment according to the QRS wave group location and medical statistical law. Secondly, we extract ST segment area, mean value, difference with reference baseline, slope, and mean squared error features. In addition, the ST segment is converted into a surface, the gradient features of the ST surface are extracted, and the morphological features are formed into a feature vector. Finally, the support vector machine is used to classify the ST segment, and then the ST segment morphology is multi-classified. The MIT-Beth Israel Hospital Database (MITDB) and the European ST-T database (EDB) were used as data sources to validate the algorithm in this paper, and the results showed that the algorithm in this paper achieved an average recognition rate of 97.79% and 95.60%, respectively, in the process of ST segment recognition. Based on the results of this paper, it is expected that this method can be introduced in the clinical setting in the future to provide morphological guidance for the diagnosis of cardiovascular diseases in the clinic and improve the diagnostic efficiency.
Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is a new technique applied in cardiovascular system. It can detect vessel intimal, small structure of plaque surface and discover small lesions with its high axial resolution and quantification character. Especially with the application of OCT in characterization of coronary atherosclerotic plaque, diagnosis and treatment strategy making, optimizing percutaneous coronary intervention therapy and assessment after stent planting make the OCT become an efficient tool for cardiovascular disease diagnosis and treatment. This paper presents a novel coronary vessel intimal sequence extraction method based on prior boundary constraints in OCT image. On the basis of conventional Chan-Vese model, we modified the evolutionary weight function to control the evolutionary rate of boundary by adding local information of boundary curve. At the same time, we added the gradient energy term and intimal boundary constraint term based on priori boundary condition to further control the evolutionary of boundary curve. At last, coronary vessel intimal is extracted in a sequence way. The comparison with vessel intimal, manual segmented by clinical scientists (golden standard), indicates that our coronary vessel intimal extraction method is robust to intimal boundary blur, distortion, guide wire shadow and plaque disturbs. The results of this study can be applied to clinical aid diagnosis and precise diagnosis and treatment.