Methods for Atherosclerotic Plaque Phenotyping – Leslie Solorzano

Methods for Atherosclerotic Plaque Phenotyping
Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is mainly related to complications from atherosclerosis and accounts for more than 30% of overall global mortality. Atherosclerosis leads to plaques in the arteries with lipids, inflammation, and fibrosis. The disease can impair blood flow and cause organ ischemia, and when lesions become unstable, plaque rupture or erosions can lead to atherothrombosis, block blood flow and cause myocardial infarction or cerebral embolization and stroke from plaques in the carotid bifurcation. The main goal is to improve treatment of patients with CVD using the Biobank of Karolinska Endarterectomies (BiKE) and associated clinical and molecular analyses of plasma and plaques from patients with carotid disease. One aspect of the work involves the segmentation of relevant morphologies (phenotypes) and the association of Bulk RNA of plaques to the accompanying histological slides. Using self supervised learning, graph clustering and partial labeling for evaluation, the project so far has successfully segmented the slides from the dataset and the current work involves performing Gene Set Enrichment Analysis, to determine whether a defined set of genes shows statistically significant differences in symptomaticity