Automated Characterization of Atheromatous Plaque in Intravascular Ultrasound Images Using Neuro Fuzzy Classifier

The medical imaging field has grown significantly in recent years and demands high accuracy since it deals with human life. The idea is to reduce human error as much as possible by assisting physicians and radiologists with some automatic techniques. The use of artificial intelligent techniques has shown great potential in this field. Hence, in this paper the neuro fuzzy classifier is applied for the automated characterization of atheromatous plaque to identify the fibrotic, lipidic and calcified tissues in Intravascular Ultrasound images (IVUS) which is designed using sixteen inputs, corresponds to sixteen pixels of instantaneous scanning matrix, one output that tells whether the pixel under consideration is Fibrotic, Lipidic, Calcified or Normal pixel. The classification performance was evaluated in terms of sensitivity, specificity and accuracy and the results confirmed that the proposed system has potential in detecting the respective plaque with the average accuracy of 98.9%.