Abstract: IntraVascular UltraSound (IVUS) is a technique allowing the diagnosis of coronary plaque. An accurate (semi-)automatic assessment of the luminal contours could speed up the diagnosis. In most of the approaches, the information on the vessel shape is obtained combining a supervised learning step with a local refinement algorithm. In this paper, we explore for the first time, the use of a Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) architecture that on one hand is able to extract the optimal image features and at the same time can serve as a supervised classifier to detect the lumen border in IVUS images. The main limitation of CNN, relies on the fact that this technique requires a large amount of training data due to the huge amount of parameters that it has. To
solve this issue, we introduce a patch classification approach to generate an extended training-set from a few annotated images. An accuracy of 93% and F-score of 71% was obtained with this technique, even when it was applied to challenging frames containig calcified plaques, stents and catheter shadows.