Cardiac allograft vasculopathy (CAV) accounts for about 30% of all heart-transplant (HTx) patient deaths. For patients at high risk for CAV complications after HTx, therapy must be initiated early to be effective. Therefore, new phenotyping approaches are needed to identify such HTx patients at the earliest possible time. Coronary optical coherence tomography (OCT) images were acquired from 50 HTx patients 1 and 12 months after HTx. Quantitative analysis of coronary wall morphology used LOGISMOS segmentation strategy to simultaneously identify three wall-layer surfaces for the entire pullback length in 3D: luminal, outer intimal, and outer medial surfaces. To quantify changes of coronary wall morphology between 1 and 12 months after HTx, the two pullbacks were mutually co-registered. Validation of layer thickness measurements showed high accuracy of performed layer analyses with layer thickness measures correlating well with manually-defined independent standard (Rautomated2 = 0.93, y=1.0x-6.2μm), average intimal+medial thickness errors were 4.98 ± 31.24 μm, comparable with inter-observer variability. Quantitative indices of coronary wall morphology 1 month and 12 months after HTx showed significant local as well as regional changes associated with CAV progression. Some of the newly available fully-3D baseline indices (intimal layer brightness, medial layer brightness, medial thickness, and intimal+medial thickness) were associated with CAV-related progression of intimal thickness showing promise of identifying patients subjected to rapid intimal thickening at 12 months after HTx from OCT-image data obtained just 1 month after HTx. Our approach allows quantification of location-specific alterations of coronary wall morphology over time and is sensitive even to very small changes of wall layer thicknesses that occur in patients following heart transplant.

2nd Department of Medicine Department of Cardiovascular Medicine 1st Faculty of Medicine Charles University Prague and General University Hospital Prague Czech Republic

Cardiovascular and Transplantation Surgery Center Department of Cardiovascular Diseases St Annes University Hospital and Masaryk University Brno Czech Republic

Institute of Clinical and Experimental Medicine Prague Czech Republic

Iowa Institute for Biomedical Imaging The University of Iowa Iowa City IA 52242 USA

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