Ultrasound IMT measurement on a multi-ethnic and multi-institutional database: Our review and experience using four fully automated and one semi-automated methods

Authors:
Filippo Molinari;Kristen M. Meiburger;Luca Saba;U. Rajendra Acharya;Giuseppe Ledda;Guang Zeng;Sin Yee Stella Ho;Anil T. Ahuja;Suzanne C. Ho;Andrew Nicolaides;Jasjit S. Suri
Affiliations:
Biolab, Department of Electronics and Telecommunications, Politecnico di Torino, Torino, Italy;Biolab, Department of Electronics and Telecommunications, Politecnico di Torino, Torino, Italy;Department of Radiology, A.U.O. Cagliari, Cagliari, Italy;Dept ECE, Ngee Ann Polytechnic, Singapore, Singapore;Department of Radiology, A.U.O. Cagliari, Cagliari, Italy;Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN, USA;Department of Imaging and Interventional Radiology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong;Department of Imaging and Interventional Radiology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong;School of Public Health and Primary Care, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong;Vascular Diagnostic Center, Nicosia, Cyprus;CTO, Department of Diagnostic and Monitoring Imaging, AtheroPoint, LLC, CA, USA and Biomedical Engineering Division, Global Biomedical Technologies, Inc., CA, USA and Biomedical Engineering Depart ...
Venue:
Computer Methods and Programs in Biomedicine
Year:
2012

Citing 6
Cited 2

Segmentation of the carotid intima-media region in B-mode ultrasound images

Image and Vision Computing
Review: A state of the art review on intima-media thickness (IMT) measurement and wall segmentation techniques for carotid ultrasound

Computer Methods and Programs in Biomedicine
Segmentation of ultrasound images of the carotid using RANSAC and cubic splines

Computer Methods and Programs in Biomedicine
Inter-Greedy Technique for Fusion of Different Segmentation Strategies Leading to High-Performance Carotid IMT Measurement in Ultrasound Images

Journal of Medical Systems
White and black blood volumetric angiographic filtering: ellipsoidal scale-space approach

IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in Biomedicine
EdgeFlow: a technique for boundary detection and image segmentation

IEEE Transactions on Image Processing

Inter- and intra-observer variability analysis of completely automated cIMT measurement software (AtheroEdgeTM) and its benchmarking against commercial ultrasound scanner and expert Readers

Computers in Biology and Medicine
Robust information gain based fuzzy c-means clustering and classification of carotid artery ultrasound images

Computer Methods and Programs in Biomedicine

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Automated and high performance carotid intima-media thickness (IMT) measurement is gaining increasing importance in clinical practice to assess the cardiovascular risk of patients. In this paper, we compare four fully automated IMT measurement techniques (CALEX, CAMES, CARES and CAUDLES) and one semi-automated technique (FOAM). We present our experience using these algorithms, whose lumen-intima and media-adventitia border estimation use different methods that can be: (a) edge-based; (b) training-based; (c) feature-based; or (d) directional Edge-Flow based. Our database (DB) consisted of 665 images that represented a multi-ethnic group and was acquired using four OEM scanners. The performance evaluation protocol adopted error measures, reproducibility measures, and Figure of Merit (FoM). FOAM showed the best performance, with an IMT bias equal to 0.025+/-0.225mm, and a FoM equal to 96.6%. Among the four automated methods, CARES showed the best results with a bias of 0.032+/-0.279mm, and a FoM to 95.6%, which was statistically comparable to that of FOAM performance in terms of accuracy and reproducibility. This is the first time that completely automated and user-driven techniques have been compared on a multi-ethnic dataset, acquired using multiple original equipment manufacturer (OEM) machines with different gain settings, representing normal and pathologic cases.