Automatic detection of bioresorbable vascular scaffold struts in intravascular optical coherence tomography pullback runs

Bioresorbable vascular scaffolds (BVS) have gained significant interest in both the technical and clinical communities as a possible alternative to metallic stents. For accurate BVS analysis, intravascular optical coherence tomography (IVOCT) is currently the most suitable imaging technique due to its high resolution and the translucency of polymeric BVS struts for near infrared light. However, given the large number of struts in an IVOCT pullback run, quantitative analysis is only feasible when struts are detected automatically. In this paper, we present an automated method to detect and measure BVS struts based on their black cores in IVOCT images. Validated using 3 baseline and 3 follow-up data sets, the method detected 93.7% of 4691 BVS struts correctly with 1.8% false positives. In total, the Dice's coefficient for BVS strut areas was 0.84. It concludes that this method can detect BVS struts accurately and robustly for tissue coverage measurement, malapposition detection, strut distribution analysis or 3D scaffold reconstruction.