title: Prediction of high-risk asymptomatic carotid plaques based on ultrasonic image features.
abstract: Carotid plaques have been associated with ipsilateral neurological symptoms. High-resolution ultrasound can provide information not only on the degree of carotid artery stenosis but also on the characteristics of the arterial wall including the size and consistency of atherosclerotic plaques. The aim of this study is to determine whether the addition of ultrasonic plaque texture features to clinical features in patients with asymptomatic internal carotid artery stenosis (ACS) improves the ability to identify plaques that will produce stroke. 1121 patients with ACS have been scanned with ultrasound and followed for a mean of 4 years. It is shown that the combination of texture features based on second-order statistics spatial gray level dependence matrices (SGLDM) and clinical factors improves stroke prediction (by correctly predicting 89 out of the 108 cases that were symptomatic). Here, the best classification results of  77 ±1.8% were obtained from the use of the SGLDM texture features with support vector machine classifiers. The combination of morphological features with clinical features gave slightly worse classification results of  76 ±2.6% . These findings need to be further validated in additional prospective studies.
authors.affiliation: Frederick University, Limassol 3080, Cyprus. ekyriac@ucy.ac.cy
authors.forename: Efthyvoulos C
authors.initials: EC
authors.lastname: Kyriacou
authors.forename: Styliani
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Petroudi
authors.forename: Constantinos S
authors.initials: CS
authors.lastname: Pattichis
authors.forename: Marios S
authors.initials: MS
authors.lastname: Pattichis
authors.forename: Maura
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Griffin
authors.forename: Stavros
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Kakkos
authors.forename: Andrew
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Nicolaides
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D058070:Asymptomatic Diseases; D016893:Carotid Stenosis / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging* / Q000473:pathology; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D018570:Risk Assessment; D012680:Sensitivity and Specificity; D020521:Stroke / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging* / Q000473:pathology; D060388:Support Vector Machine; D014463:Ultrasonography