Distal wall delineation using automated Dual Snake paradigm: a multi-center and multi-ethnic carotid ultrasound evaluation.
We present here a novel and patented completely automated IMT measurement system that we developed for common carotid arterial ultrasound longitudinal images, called Carotid Measurement Using Dual Snakes (CMUDS) - a class of AtheroEdge™ system. CMUDS is a dual deformable parametric model (snake) system where the dual snakes evolve simultaneously and are forced to maintain a regularized distance to prevent collapsing or diverging. We benchmarked CMUDS against a conventional single snake (CMUSS). CMUDS is totally automatic while CMUSS is semi-automatic. For performance evaluation, two readers manually traced the lumen-intima (LI) and media-adventitia (MA) borders of our multi-institutional, multi-ethnic, and multi-scanner database of 655 longitudinal B-Mode ultrasound images. CMUDS and CMUSS correctly processed all 665 images. The average IMT biases were equal to 0.030±0.284 mm and -0.004±0.273 mm for CMUDS, and -0.011±0.329 mm and -0.045±0.317 mm for CMUSS. The Figure of Merit of the system was 96.0% and 99.6% for CMUDS and 98.5% and 94.4% for CMUSS. CMUDS improved accuracy (Wilcoxon, p&#60;0.02) and reproducibility (Fisher, p&#60;3 10(-2)), proving that the novel CMUDS system is adaptable to large multi-centric studies, where a standard IMT measurement technique is required.
Department of Electronics and Telecommunications, Politecnico di Torino, 10129 Torino, Italy. filippo.molinari@polito.it
Filippo
F
Molinari
Kristen M
KM
Meiburger
Luca
L
Saba
Guang
G
Zeng
U Rajendra
UR
Acharya
Mario
M
Piga
Shoaib
S
Shafique
Andrew
A
Nicolaides
Jasjit
J
Suri
D000465:Algorithms; D017536:Carotid Artery, Common / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging*; D059168:Carotid Intima-Media Thickness / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D016208:Databases, Factual; D003936:Diagnosis, Computer-Assisted / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D005006:Ethnicity; D006801:Humans; D007090:Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted; D015233:Models, Statistical