Abstract: Accurate detection of in-vivo vulnerable plaque in coronary arteries is still an open problem. Recent studies show that it is highly related to tissue structure and composition. Intravascular Ultrasound (IVUS) is a powerful imaging technique that gives a detailed cross-sectional image of the vessel, allowing to explore arteries morphology. IVUS data validation is usually performed by comparing post-mortem (in-vitro) IVUS data and corresponding histological analysis of the tissue. The main drawback of this method is the few number of available case studies and validated data due to the complex procedure of histological analysis of the tissue. On the other hand, IVUS data from in-vivo cases is easy to obtain but it can not be histologically validated. In this work, we propose to enhance the in-vitro training data set by selectively including examples from in-vivo plaques. For this purpose, a Sequential Floating Forward Selection method is reformulated in the context of plaque characterization. The enhanced classifier performance is validated on in-vitro data set, yielding an overall accuracy of 91.59% in discriminating among fibrotic, lipidic and calcified plaques, while reducing the gap between in-vivo and in-vitro data analysis. Experimental results suggest that the obtained classifier could be properly applied on in-vivo plaque characterization and also demonstrate that the common hypothesis of assuming the difference between in-vivo and in-vitro as negligible is incorrect.

Abstract: In recent years, several deep learning models have been proposed to accurately quantify and diagnose cardiac pathologies. These automated tools heavily rely on the accurate segmentation of cardiac structures in MRI images. However, segmentation of the right ventricle is challenging due to its highly complex shape and ill-defined borders. Hence, there is a need for new methods to handle such structure's geometrical and textural complexities, notably in the presence of pathologies such as Dilated Right Ventricle, Tricuspid Regurgitation, Arrhythmogenesis, Tetralogy of Fallot, and Inter-atrial Communication. The last MICCAI challenge on right ventricle segmentation was held in 2012 and included only 48 cases from a single clinical center. As part of the 12th Workshop on Statistical Atlases and Computational Models of the Heart (STACOM 2021), the M&Ms-2 challenge was organized to promote the interest of the research community around right ventricle segmentation in multi-disease, multi-view, and multi-center cardiac MRI. Three hundred sixty CMR cases, including short-axis and long-axis 4-chamber views, were collected from three Spanish hospitals using nine different scanners from three different vendors, and included a diverse set of right and left ventricle pathologies. The solutions provided by the participants show that nnU-Net achieved the best results overall. However, multi-view approaches were able to capture additional information, highlighting the need to integrate multiple cardiac diseases, views, scanners, and acquisition protocols to produce reliable automatic cardiac segmentation algorithms.