Novel quantitative description approaches assessing coronary morphology and development

Abstract

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTSI would like to first say thank you to my advisor, Dr. Milan Sonka, co-director of Iowa Institute for Biomedical Imaging (IIBI). He has given me constant support and guidance since the first day I began working with him. He helps me build up confidence by encouraging me and showing appreciation for all my work. Many thanks also go to Dr. Andreas Wahle for his advice and informative discussion throughout the entire project. I learned from both of them real scientific attitude about creativity, honesty, objectivity and curiosity. My deep appreciation goes out to all cardiologists I have worked with. I have interacted with Dr. John Lopez weekly who is always helpful and provides me insight into cardiovascular diseases. A special thank you to Dr. Tomas Kovarnik for his patient data collection and intravascular ultrasound tracing work with our software. Without his diligent clinical work and invaluable feedback, my research aims would not have been achievable. I am also grateful to Dr. Michal Pazdernik for providing heart transplant datasets, which show me a chance to expand my research field. I am especially grateful to Dr. Michal Pazdernik and my colleague Zhihui Guo for taking a significant time and effort to manually trace IVOCT images. Without those precious tracings, my PhD study would not have been complete. Dr. Ling Zhang deserves a special thank you for our collaborative work on registration throughout the IVUS project. I greatly appreciate the support from Dr. Honghai Zhang for graph-based discussions and guidance on coding conventions during the last phase of my PhD work. As a teaching assistant this semester, I am indebted to Dr. Mona K. Garvin especially for always providing homework solution in advance. This helps me a lot for grading and preparing for my office hours. Thus, I have more time to write my thesis. Additionally, I would like to thank Dr. Edwin L. Dove, Dr. Punam Saha and Dr. Mona K. Garvin for serving on my committee and guiding me through all these years. ii Last but not least, I would like to give special thanks to my family: my dad and my mom, Guoqin Chen and Yinping Ye for always encouraging me to follow my dreams; my younger brother, Ziye Chen for always believing in me; my dear wife, Shichao Wang for her love and support over 10 years; my sweet daughter, HannahChen for bringing me the greatest happiness of life during this challenging period.iii ABSTRACT Coronary atherosclerosis is by far the most frequent cause of ischemic heart disease. Intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) along with virtual histology (VH) is a useful tool for quantification of coronary plaque buildup and provides new insights into the diagnosis of coronary disease. Rupture of vulnerable plaque causing acute coronary syndromes, coronary remodeling maintaining lumen size and plaque phenotype revealing pathological severity are among the most important topics related to atherosclerosis. In this thesis, variations of IVUS-VH-derived thin-cap fibroatheroma (TCFA) definitions are proposed to evaluate the plaque...

Heart rate and early progression of cardiac allograft vasculopathy: A prospective study using highly automated 3‐D optical coherence tomography analysis

“…Boundaries were identified as OCT brightness changes showing tissue interfaces between adjacent wall layers. Automatically identified borders were efficiently edited using our Just‐Enough‐Interaction method adapted for the OCT segmentation environment . This technique allows segmentation errors to be corrected in a 3D fashion on a regional basis, an alternative to contour‐by‐contour/frame‐by‐frame manual retracing.…”

“…Automatically identified borders were efficiently edited using our Just-Enough-Interaction method adapted for the OCT segmentation environment. 16,17 This technique allows segmentation errors to be corrected in a 3D fashion on a regional basis, an…”