Assessment of vulnerable coronary plaque by intravascular elasticity imaging

Plaque rupture is regarded as one of main causes of acute coronary syndromes. To prevent plaque rupture and guide a pharmacological treatment, it is important to image the weak (fragile) part of atheroscleotic plaque. Our preliminary experiments revealed the feasibility of stain image using IVUS to discriminate between different types of plaque. In this paper, for the purpose of obtaining more fine and stable assessments of vulnerable plaque under interventional conditions, we propose a strain power image as an index of tissue deformability by analyzing the time-varying strain profiles obtained from the IVUS data. We also conducted in vivo test with a new acquisition device that allows us to capture a large scale of RF data. And its results demonstrated that the strain power imaging has the potential to evaluate the vulnerability of plaques