Identification of vessel wall degradation in ascending thoracic aortic aneurysms with OCT

Real Peña, Eusebio; Val Bernal, José Fernando; Revuelta Soba, José Manuel; Pontón Cortina, Alejandro; Calvo Díez, Marta; Mayorga Fernández, Marta María; López Higuera, José Miguel; Conde Portilla, Olga María

doi:10.1364/BOE.5.004089

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Identificadores

URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10902/5538

DOI: 10.1364/BOE.5.004089

ISSN: 2156-7085

Fecha

2014-11-01

Derechos

© 2014 Optical Society of America. This paper was published in Biomedical Optics Express and is made available as an electronic reprint with the permission of OSA. The paper can be found at the following URL on the OSA website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1364/BOE.5.004089. Systematic or multiple reproduction or distribution to multiple locations via electronic or other means is prohibited and is subject to penalties under law.

Publicado en

Biomedical Optics Express, 2014, 5 (11), 4089-4100

Editorial

The Optical Society (OSA)

Enlace a la publicación

http://doi.org/10.1364/BOE.5.004089

Palabras clave

Optical coherence tomography

Tissue characterization

Resumen/Abstract

Degradation of the wall of human ascending thoracic aorta has been assessed through Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT). OCT images of the media layer of the aortic wall exhibit micro-structure degradation in case of diseased aortas from aneurysmal vessels. The OCT indicator of degradation depends on the dimension of areas of the media layer where backscattered reflectivity becomes smaller due to a disorder on the morphology of elastin, collagen and smooth muscle cells (SMCs). Efficient pre-processing of the OCT images is required to accurately extract the dimension of degraded areas after an optimized thresholding procedure. OCT results have been validated against conventional histological analysis. The OCT qualitative assessment has achieved a pair sensitivity-specificity of 100%-91.6% in low-high degradation discrimination when a threshold of 4965.88μm2 is selected. This threshold suggests to have physiological meaning. The OCT quantitative evaluation of degradation achieves a correlation of 0.736 between the OCT indicator and the histological score. This in-vitro study can be transferred to the clinical scenario to provide an intraoperative assessment tool to guide cardiovascular surgeons in open repair interventions.