Systematic mapping study on diagnosis of vulnerable plaque

Post-mortem studies demonstrate that around two thirds of all myocardial infarctions are typically result of the plaque rupture. In this paper, systematic mapping study is applied to specify the vulnerable plaque research area. The scope of this research has been limited to the published papers of IEEE Transactions, Sciencedirect, and Springer between 2000 and 2016 years. The related studies are categorized into research question, research strategy, research challenge, and research framework. Based on the mapping results, the researchers are focused on the clinical analysis and algorithmic approach. This paper describes a review of state-of-the-art literature on TCFA detection techniques, motivations, issues, and existing challenges in terms of imaging modalities, plaque characterization techniques, and plaque type classification. A summary of each study containing the author names, publication year, technique, advantages, and drawbacks is presented at the end of each subsection.