Learning to Detect Stent Struts in Intravascular Ultrasound

In this paper we tackle the automatic detection of struts elements (metallic braces of a stent device) in Intravascular Ultrasound (IVUS) sequences. The proposed method is based on context-aware classification of IVUS images, where we use Multi-Class Multi-Scale Stacked Sequential Learning (M2SSL). Additionally, we introduce a novel technique to reduce the amount of required contextual features. The comparison with binary and multi-class learning is also performed, using a dataset of IVUS images with struts manually annotated by an expert. The best performing configuration reaches a F-measure F = 63.97% .