Automatic Classification of Coronary Stenosis using Convolutional Neural Networks and Simulated Annealing

Abstract

Automatic detection of coronary stenosis plays an essential role in systems that perform computer-aided diagnosis in cardiology. Coronary stenosis is a narrowing of the coronary arteries caused by plaque that reduces the blood flow to the heart. Automatic classification of coronary stenosis images has been 228recently addressed using deep and machine learning techniques. Generally, the machine learning methods form a bank of empirical and automatic features from the angiographic images. In the present work, a novel method for the automatic classification of coronary stenosis X-ray images is presented. The method is based on convolutional neural networks, where the neural architecture search is performed by using the path-based metaheuristics of simulated annealing To perform the neural architecture search, the maximization of the F1-score metric is used as the fitness function. The automatically generated convolutional neural network was compared with three deep learning methods in terms of the accuracy and F1-score metrics using a testing set of images obtaining 0.88 and 0.89, respectively. In addition, the proposed method was evaluated with different sets of coronary stenosis images obtained via data augmentation. The results involving a number of different instances have shown that the proposed architecture is robust preserving the efficiency with different datasets.