A novel approach to quantitative analysis of intravascular optical coherence tomography imaging

Quantitative analysis on intracoronary optical coherence tomography (OCT) image data (e.g. QOCT) is currently performed by a time-consuming manual contour tracing process in many individual OCT images acquired during a pullback procedure (frame-based method). In order to get a more efficient quantitative analysis process and to investigate the possibilities to use this contour information for development of an image based retrospective OCT-gating method, as a first step a novel approach has been developed that exploits a full automated contour tracing method for coronary lumens in OCT images without the need for intensive observer related actions. This study presents this new method, which was tested on in-vivo acquired human coronary OCT image data of 10 randomly selected patients.