System and method for determining atherosclerotic pathological tissue types in a coronary artery oct image using trained engines

Abstract

There is described a system for determining an atherosclerotic pathological tissue type of a coronary artery, the system comprising: an optical coherence tomography (OCT) imaging system being configured for acquiring an OCT image of tissue within said coronary artery; and a controller configured for: using a trained fully convolutional engine stored on said memory and having a plurality of convolutional layers with respective dilation rates different than unity, extracting pathological tissues regardless their type in at least a region of interest of said OCT image; using a trained auto-encoder classification engine stored on said memory and having a layer characterized with a sparsity regularization parameter, determining an atherosclerotic pathological tissue type associated to said region of interest of said OCT image based on said extracted pathological tissues; and outputting said atherosclerotic pathological tissue type of said coronary artery.