Classification Approach for Measurement of Atherosclerosis Using B-Mode Ultrasound Carotid Images

Abstract

This paper presents an approach for the detection and delineation of the interfaces at the near and far walls of carotid artery using B-mode ultrasound images. After the delineation the system measures automatically the carotid intima-media thickness (IMT) in order to aid the diagnosis of the atherosclerosis. In this method we start by the measurement, at a pixel level, of local features followed by the selection of the most discriminant ones. The next stage is a classification step which assigns a probability to the pixels to belong to an interface, enabling the detection of the carotid artery interfaces. The final artery boundaries are delineated using a dynamic programming approach. The final measurements of IMT produced by the automatic method proposed in this paper were compared with three manual tracings of experts. It was also compared with an automatic method previously developed. The results show that the two automatic detection methods have similar performance, although with slight improvements in the new method, particularly for the the far wall interface.