Intra-Vascular Ultra Sound Image Classification System for the Diagnosis of Coronary Artery Disease Using Adaptive Wavelet Transform with Support Vector Machine

Abstract

In this study, an efficient Decision Support System (DSS) is presented to classify coronary artery disease using Intra-Vascular Ultra Sound (IVUS) images. IVUS images are commonly used to diagnose coronary artery diseases. Wavelet transform is a multiresolution texture analysis tool which is applied to various image analysis and classification systems. Unlike the wavelet transform, Empirical Wavelet Transform (EWT) is a dependent decomposition approach that provides superior temporal and frequency information. Hence, EWT is considered as a feature extraction approach in this study. Before extracting EWT features, an adaptive non-linear speckle reducing filter; Lee filter is used to remove the IVUS images’ noises. The accumulated energies of EWT sub-bands are computed and fed to four Support Vector Machine (SVM) for coronary plague classification into five different classes; normal, calcium, fibrous, necrotic (thrombus) and soft plague (fibro-fatty). A total number of 400 IVUS images and their corresponding labeling are obtained from Shifa hospitals, Tirunelveli, Tamilnadu, India. Results prove that the classification of coronary plague is done with higher accuracy by using the EWT-SVM approach.