Vascular imaging modulography: an experimental in vitro study

The major cause of thrombosis, occlusion and acute coronary syndrome is the result of atherosclerotic plaque rupture (Virmani et al. 2000). It is now recognised that the prediction of the vulnerable coronary plaque rupture requires not only an accurate quantification of fibrous cap thickness, Capthick (minimum distance between the necrotic core and the vessel lumen) and necrotic core morphology (Virmani et al. 2000), but also a precise estimation of the mechanical properties of plaque components. Indeed, such knowledge allows a precise evaluation of the peak capstress amplitude that appears to be responsible for plaque rupture (Ohayon et al. 2008). Several studies have been performed to reconstruct a Young’s modulus (YM) map (or modulograms) from intravascular strain elastograms (Baldewsing et al. 2008). In a previous work, our group proposed an original theoretical imaging modulography approach (iMOD), combining a dynamic segmentation method with an optimisation procedure to extract both plaque morphology and modulograms of the atherosclerotic plaque (Le Floc’h et al. 2009). In the present study, an in vitro experiment was designed to investigate the performance and robustness of our algorithm iMOD.