Phenotyping calcification in vascular tissues using artificial intelligence

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel AI-based pipeline for high-throughput, non-destructive phenotyping of vascular calcification, enabling better risk assessment for cardiovascular events through detailed classification of calcification types.

Contribution

It introduces a new classification system and a semi-automated deep learning pipeline for phenotyping calcification in vascular tissues, addressing current limitations in imaging analysis.

Findings

Achieved high segmentation accuracy with Dice coefficients of 0.96 and 0.87.

Processed thousands of calcification particles in under seven hours.

Validated on five vascular specimens with minimal training data.

Abstract

Vascular calcification is implicated as an important factor in major adverse cardiovascular events (MACE), including heart attack and stroke. A controversy remains over how to integrate the diverse forms of vascular calcification into clinical risk assessment tools. Even the commonly used calcium score for coronary arteries, which assumes risk scales positively with total calcification, has important inconsistencies. Fundamental studies are needed to determine how risk is influenced by the diverse calcification phenotypes. However, studies of these kinds are hindered by the lack of high-throughput, objective, and non-destructive tools for classifying calcification in imaging data sets. Here, we introduce a new classification system for phenotyping calcification along with a semi-automated, non-destructive pipeline that can distinguish these phenotypes in even atherosclerotic tissues. The pipeline includes a deep-learning-based framework for segmenting lipid pools in noisy micro-CT images and an unsupervised clustering framework for categorizing calcification based on size, clustering, and topology. This approach is illustrated for five vascular specimens, providing phenotyping for thousands of calcification particles across as many as 3200 images in less than seven hours. Average Dice Similarity Coefficients of 0.96 and 0.87 could be achieved for tissue and lipid pool, respectively, with training and validation needed on only 13 images despite the high heterogeneity in these tissues. By introducing an efficient and comprehensive approach to phenotyping calcification, this work enables large-scale studies to identify a more reliable indicator of the risk of cardiovascular events, a leading cause of global mortality and morbidity.