Coronary artery disease (CAD) remains the leading cause of death globally and invasive coronary angiography (ICA) is considered the gold standard of anatomical imaging evaluation when CAD is suspected. However, risk evaluation based on ICA has several limitations, such as visual assessment of stenosis severity, which has significant interobserver variability. This motivates to development of a lesion classification system that can support specialists in their clinical procedures. Although deep learning classification methods are well‐developed in other areas of medical imaging, ICA image classification is still at an early stage. One of the most important reasons is the lack of available and high‐quality open‐access datasets. In this paper, we reported a new annotated ICA images dataset, CADICA, to provide the research community with a comprehensive and rigorous dataset of coronary angiography consisting of a set of acquired patient videos and associated disease‐related metadata. This dataset can be used by clinicians to train their skills in angiographic assessment of CAD severity, by computer scientists to create computer‐aided diagnostic systems to help in such assessment, and to validate existing methods for CAD detection. In addition, baseline classification methods are proposed and analysed, validating the functionality of CADICA with deep learning‐based methods and giving the scientific community a starting point to improve CAD detection.

Self-organizing maps (SOMs) are aimed to learn a representation of the input distribution which faithfully describes the topological relations among the clusters of the distribution. For some data sets and applications, it is known beforehand that some regions of the input space cannot contain any samples. Those are known as forbidden regions. In these cases, any prototype which lies in a forbidden region is meaningless. However, previous self-organizing models do not address this problem. In this paper, we propose a new SOM model which is guaranteed to keep all prototypes out of a set of prespecified forbidden regions. Experimental results are reported, which show that our proposal outperforms the SOM both in terms of vector quantization error and quality of the learned topological maps.