Plaque vulnerability assessment in medical imaging

A method for assessing plaque vulnerability of a patient in medical imaging, the method comprising:

• loading a morphological characteristic of plaque of a patient, a hemodynamic characteristic, an anatomy characteristic of a vessel with the plaque, and a biochemical characteristic of the plaque as an input feature vector, where a biochemical characteristic is a level of high sensitive troponin;
• classifying a vulnerability of the plaque of the patient by a machine-trained classifier in response to the input feature vector, the classifying being part of a risk stratification based on the hemodynamic, biochemical, and anatomy characteristics;
• and
• signaling a result of the classifying to a user.

A method for assessing plaque vulnerability of a patient in medical imaging, the method comprising:

• extracting an anatomical feature of a vessel or plaque and a morphological feature of the plaque from a scan of the patient by a medical imaging scanner;
• obtaining a hemodynamic feature of the patient from a hemodynamic sensor or personalized modeling of the vessel based on the scan;
• receiving at an interface a biochemical feature from a blood test of the patient, the receiving comprising receiving a level of high sensitive troponin;
• calculating by a machine-implemented classifier a risk score for plaque rupture for the patient and a risk stratification, both the risk score and risk stratification calculated by the machine-implemented classifier from the anatomical, morphological, hemodynamic, and biochemical features;
• and
• transmitting the risk score for the patient to a display.