Virtual Inflation of the Cerebral Artery Wall for the Integrated Exploration of OCT and Histology Data

Intravascular imaging provides new insights into the condition of vessel walls. This is crucial for cerebrovascular diseases including stroke and cerebral aneurysms, where it may present an important factor for indication of therapy. In this work, we provide new information of cerebral artery walls by combining ex vivo optical coherence tomography (OCT) imaging with histology data sets. To overcome the obstacles of deflated and collapsed vessels due to the missing blood pressure, the lack of co-alignment as well as the geometrical shape deformations due to catheter probing, we developed the new image processing method virtual inflation. We locally sample the vessel wall thickness based on the (deflated) vessel lumen border instead of the vessel's centerline. Our method is embedded in a multi-view framework where correspondences between OCT and histology can be highlighted via brushing and linking yielding OCT signal characteristics of the cerebral artery wall and its pathologies. Finally, we enrich the data views with a hierarchical clustering representation which is linked via virtual inflation and further supports the deduction of vessel wall pathologies.