Automation of ultrasonic image interpretation for characterization of atherosclerotic plaques and#8195;

Abstract

The diagnosis of risk of carotid atherosclerosis is of vital importance, as this newlinecardiovascular disease may cause myocardial infarction. One-third of deaths in the world newlineoccur due to myocardial infarction, commonly known as heart attack. The chance of newlinestroke rises with the thickening of the wall of carotid artery due to the deposition of newlineplaques. Hence accurate measurement of the intima-media thickness in the vessel walls newlineis necessary for predicting the chance of stroke. Ultrasonic images of plaque deposition newlinein the intima-media complex are segmented and extracted using new segmentation newlinealgorithm. This study analyses the characteristics of plaque in carotid artery and classifies newlineinto symptomatic and asymptomatic types based on the severity. In the asymptomatic newlinetype, plaque formation slowly reaches a life-threatening condition and in the symptomatic newlinecase, plaque is acute in nature. The options for treatment are carotid artery stenting and newlinecarotid endarterectomy and the choice is made by the cardiologist, depending on the newlinecondition of the patient. This proposed technique could work as an adjunct tool in newlinedeciding the treatment protocol. newlineThe ultrasound images of the common carotid artery are in longitudinal B-mode, used newlinefor segmentation and further processing, provided in open access by The Laboratory of newlinee-Health, University of Cyprus. The pre-processing of the ultrasound images is done by newlinelocal statistics mean and variance filter and it reduces the speckle noise while keeping the newlinesignificant tissue boundaries unchanged in the image. The challenging task of newlinesegmentation of plaque from the image is done by modified snakes based algorithm. The newlinestopping criterion and active resampling proposed by Nikolas are incorporated in the newlinesnake based segmentation algorithm modified by Loizou, and a new algorithm has been newlinedeveloped for segmenting the intima-media-complex. Using the fixed size of window, a newlineblock of plaque, is cropped for feature computation. newline