Deep convolutional neural networks for cardiovascular vulnerable plaque detection

¹ College of Mechanical Engineering and Automation, Northeastern University, Shenyang, China
² Institute of Machine Learning and Statistics, College of Information Science and Engineering, Northeastern University, Shenyang, China

^* Corresponding author: lincanli@outlook.com

Abstract

In this paper, an accurate two-stage deep learning method is proposed to detect vulnerable plaques in ultrasonic images of cardiovascular. Firstly, a Fully Convonutional Neural Network (FCN) named U-Net is used to segment the original Intravascular Optical Coherence Tomography (IVOCT) cardiovascular images. We experiment on different threshold values to find the best threshold for removing noise and background in the original images. Secondly, a modified Faster RCNN is adopted to do precise detection. The modified Faster R-CNN utilize six-scale anchors (12²,16²,32²,64²,128²,256²) instead of the conventional one scale or three scale approaches. First, we present three problems in cardiovascular vulnerable plaque diagnosis, then we demonstrate how our method solve these problems. The proposed method in this paper apply deep convolutional neural networks to the whole diagnostic procedure. Test results show the Recall rate, Precision rate, IoU (Intersection-over-Union) rate and Total score are 0.94, 0.885, 0.913 and 0.913 respectively, higher than the 1st team of CCCV2017 Cardiovascular OCT Vulnerable Plaque Detection Challenge. AP of the designed Faster RCNN is 83.4%, higher than conventional approaches which use one-scale or three-scale anchors. These results demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed method and the power of deep learning approaches in diagnose cardiovascular vulnerable plaques.