Markus Heyder

Nils Gessert, Markus Heyder, Sarah Latus et al.

Deep learning methods have shown impressive results for a variety of medical problems over the last few years. However, datasets tend to be small due to time-consuming annotation. As datasets with different patients are often very heterogeneous generalization to new patients can be difficult. This is complicated further if large differences in image acquisition can occur, which is common during intravascular optical coherence tomography for coronary plaque imaging. We address this problem with an adversarial training strategy where we force a part of a deep neural network to learn features that are independent of patient- or acquisitionspecific characteristics. We compare our regularization method to typical data augmentation strategies and show that our approach improves performance for a small medical dataset.

Nils Gessert, Markus Heyder, Sarah Latus et al.

Advanced atherosclerosis in the coronary arteries is one of the leading causes of deaths worldwide while being preventable and treatable. In order to image atherosclerotic lesions (plaque), intravascular optical coherence tomography (IVOCT) can be used. The technique provides high-resolution images of arterial walls which allows for early plaque detection by experts. Due to the vast amount of IVOCT images acquired in clinical routines, automatic plaque detection has been addressed. For example, attenuation profiles in single A-Scans of IVOCT images are examined to detect plaque. We address automatic plaque classification from entire IVOCT images, the cross-sectional view of the artery, using deep feature learning. In this way, we take context between A-Scans into account and we directly learn relevant features from the image source without the need for handcrafting features.