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Accurate lumen diameter measurement in curved vessels in carotid ultrasound: an iterative scale-space and spatial transformation approach

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Abstract

Monitoring of cerebrovascular diseases via carotid ultrasound has started to become a routine. The measurement of image-based lumen diameter (LD) or inter-adventitial diameter (IAD) is a promising approach for quantification of the degree of stenosis. The manual measurements of LD/IAD are not reliable, subjective and slow. The curvature associated with the vessels along with non-uniformity in the plaque growth poses further challenges. This study uses a novel and generalized approach for automated LD and IAD measurement based on a combination of spatial transformation and scale-space. In this iterative procedure, the scale-space is first used to get the lumen axis which is then used with spatial image transformation paradigm to get a transformed image. The scale-space is then reapplied to retrieve the lumen region and boundary in the transformed framework. Then, inverse transformation is applied to display the results in original image framework. Two hundred and two patients’ left and right common carotid artery (404 carotid images) B-mode ultrasound images were retrospectively analyzed. The validation of our algorithm has done against the two manual expert tracings. The coefficient of correlation between the two manual tracings for LD was 0.98 (p < 0.0001) and 0.99 (p < 0.0001), respectively. The precision of merit between the manual expert tracings and the automated system was 97.7 and 98.7%, respectively. The experimental analysis demonstrated superior performance of the proposed method over conventional approaches. Several statistical tests demonstrated the stability and reliability of the automated system.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, National Institute of Technology Karnataka, Mangalore, India

    P. Krishna Kumar & Jeny Rajan

  2. Point-of-Care Devices, Global Biomedical Technologies, Inc., Roseville, CA, USA

    P. Krishna Kumar, Jeny Rajan & Jasjit S. Suri

  3. Division of Cardiovascular Medicine, Toho University Ohashi Medical Center, Tokyo, Japan

    Tadashi Araki

  4. Department of Radiology, University of Cagliari, Cagliari, Italy

    Luca Saba & Francesco Lavra

  5. Cardiovascular Medicine, National Center for Global Health and Medicine, Tokyo, Japan

    Nobutaka Ikeda

  6. Division of Cardiovascular Medicine, Department of Medicine, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA

    Aditya M. Sharma

  7. CorVasc Vascular Laboratory, Indianapolis, IN, USA

    Shoaib Shafique

  8. Vascular Diagnostic Center, University of Cyprus, Nicosia, Cyprus

    Andrew Nicolaides

  9. UC Davis Vascular Center, University of California, Davis, CA, USA

    John R. Laird

  10. Radiology Department, Brain and Mind Research Institute, Weill Cornell Medical College, New York, NY, USA

    Ajay Gupta

  11. Stroke Monitoring and Diagnostic Division, AtheroPoint™, Roseville, CA, 95661, USA

    Jasjit S. Suri

  12. Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Idaho (Affl.), Pocatello, ID, USA

    Jasjit S. Suri

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  1. P. Krishna Kumar
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Correspondence to Jasjit S. Suri.

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Dr. Jasjit S. Suri has a relationship with AtheroPoint™, Roseville, CA, USA, which is dedicated to Atherosclerosis Disease Management including Stroke and Cardiovascular imaging.

Appendix

Appendix

See Tables 5, 6, 7 and 8.

Table 5 T test for Auto LD versus manual tracings
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Table 6 T test for Auto IAD versus manual tracings
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Table 7 Friedman test for Auto LD versus manual tracings
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Table 8 Friedman test for Auto IAD versus manual tracings
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Krishna Kumar, P., Araki, T., Rajan, J. et al. Accurate lumen diameter measurement in curved vessels in carotid ultrasound: an iterative scale-space and spatial transformation approach. Med Biol Eng Comput 55, 1415–1434 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11517-016-1601-y

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