ArticleAtherosclerosis2019
Automated detection of superficial macrophages in atherosclerotic plaques using autofluorescence lifetime imaging.
Article in Atherosclerosis, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 14 citations in OpenAlex.
- Illuminating Immunity: A Systematic Review of Immune Cell Autofluorescence.Journal of biophotonics · 2025Pooled it
- What have we learnt from histology about the efficacy of coronary imaging modalities in assessing plaque composition?Frontiers in cardiovascular medicine · 2025Review
- Label-free macrophage phenotype classification using machine learning methods.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Rapid lipid-laden plaque identification in intravascular optical coherence tomography imaging based on time-series deep learning.Journal of biomedical optics · 2022Article
- Mesoscopic fluorescence lifetime imaging: Fundamental principles, clinical applications and future directions.Journal of biophotonics · 2021Review
- In-vivo mechanical characterization of coronary atherosclerotic plaques in living swine using intravascular laser speckle imaging.Biomedical optics express · 2021Article
- Dual-modality optical coherence tomography and frequency-domain fluorescence lifetime imaging microscope system for intravascular imaging.Journal of biomedical optics · 2020Article
- Fluorescence lifetime imaging microscopy: fundamentals and advances in instrumentation, analysis, and applications.Journal of biomedical optics · 2020Review
- Direct frequency domain fluorescence lifetime imaging using field programmable gate arrays for real time processing.The Review of scientific instruments · 2020Article
- Investigating Origins of FLIm Contrast in Atherosclerotic Lesions Using Combined FLIm-Raman Spectroscopy.Frontiers in cardiovascular medicine · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
10 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
BACKGROUND AND
aimsMacrophages play an important role in the development and destabilization of advanced atherosclerotic plaques. Hence, the clinical imaging of macrophage content in advanced plaques could potentially aid in identifying patients most at risk of future clinical events. The lifetime of the autofluorescence emission from atherosclerotic plaques has been correlated with lipids and macrophage accumulation in ex vivo human coronary arteries, suggesting the potential of intravascular endogenous fluorescence or autofluorescence lifetime imaging (FLIM) for macrophage imaging. The aim of this study was to quantify the accuracy of the coronary intima autofluorescence lifetime to detect superficial macrophage accumulation in atherosclerotic plaques.
methodsEndogenous FLIM imaging was performed on 80 fresh postmortem coronary segments from 23 subjects. The plaque autofluorescence lifetime at an emission spectral band of 494 ± 20.5 nm was used as a discriminatory feature to detect superficial macrophage accumulation in atherosclerotic plaques. Detection of superficial macrophage accumulation in the imaged coronary segments based on immunohistochemistry (CD68 staining) evaluation was taken as the gold standard. Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve analysis was applied to select an autofluorescence lifetime threshold value to detect superficial macrophages accumulation.
resultsA threshold of 6 ns in the plaque autofluorescence lifetime at the emission spectral band of 494 ± 20.5 nm was applied to detect plaque superficial macrophages accumulation, resulting in ∼91.5% accuracy.
conclusionsThis study demonstrates the capability of endogenous FLIM imaging to accurately identify superficial macrophages accumulation in human atherosclerotic plaques, a key biomarker of atherosclerotic plaque vulnerability.
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