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Zhou GQ, Wei H, Wang X, Wang KN, Chen Y, Xiong F, Ren G, Liu C, Li L, Huang Q. BSMNet: Boundary-salience multi-branch network for intima-media identification in carotid ultrasound images. Comput Biol Med 2023; 162:107092. [PMID: 37263149 DOI: 10.1016/j.compbiomed.2023.107092] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 08/23/2022] [Revised: 05/05/2023] [Accepted: 05/27/2023] [Indexed: 06/03/2023]
Abstract
Carotid artery intima-media thickness (CIMT) is an essential factor in signaling the risk of cardiovascular diseases, which is commonly evaluated using ultrasound imaging. However, automatic intima-media segmentation and thickness measurement are still challenging due to the boundary ambiguity of intima-media and inherent speckle noises in ultrasound images. In this work, we propose an end-to-end boundary-salience multi-branch network, BSMNet, to tackle the carotid intima-media identification from ultrasound images, where the prior shape knowledge and anatomical dependence are exploited using a parallel linear structure learning modules followed by a boundary refinement module. Moreover, we design a strip attention model to boost the thin strip region segmentation with shape priors, in which an anisotropic kernel shape captures long-range global relations and scrutinizes meaningful local salient contexts simultaneously. Extensive experimental results on an in-house carotid ultrasound (US) dataset demonstrate the promising performance of our method, which achieves about 0.02 improvement in Dice and HD95 than other state-of-the-art methods. Our method is promising in advancing the analysis of systemic arterial disease with ultrasound imaging.
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Affiliation(s)
- Guang-Quan Zhou
- The School of Biological Science and Medical Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing, China; Jiangsu Key Laboratory of Biomaterials and Devices, Southeast University, Nanjing, China; State Key Laboratory of Digital Medical Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing, China.
| | - Hao Wei
- The School of Biological Science and Medical Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing, China
| | - Xiaoyi Wang
- Shenzhen Delica Medical Equipment Co., Ltd, Shenzhen, 518132, China.
| | - Kai-Ni Wang
- The School of Biological Science and Medical Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing, China; Jiangsu Key Laboratory of Biomaterials and Devices, Southeast University, Nanjing, China; State Key Laboratory of Digital Medical Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing, China
| | - Yuzhao Chen
- The School of Biological Science and Medical Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing, China
| | - Fei Xiong
- Ethics Committee of Medical and Experimental Animals, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi'an, China
| | - Guanqing Ren
- Shenzhen Delica Medical Equipment Co., Ltd, Shenzhen, 518132, China
| | - Chunying Liu
- Ethics Committee of Medical and Experimental Animals, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi'an, China
| | - Le Li
- Institute of Medical Research, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi'an, China.
| | - Qinghua Huang
- School of Artificial Intelligence, OPtics and ElectroNics (iOPEN), Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi'an, China.
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Rafati M, Rahimzadeh MR, Moladoust H. Evaluation Of Atherosclerosis Severity Based On Carotid Artery Intima-Media Thickness Changes: A New Diagnostic Criterion. ULTRASOUND IN MEDICINE & BIOLOGY 2019; 45:2950-2957. [PMID: 31405604 DOI: 10.1016/j.ultrasmedbio.2019.07.412] [Citation(s) in RCA: 3] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.6] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 02/14/2019] [Revised: 06/08/2019] [Accepted: 07/14/2019] [Indexed: 06/10/2023]
Abstract
This study aimed to identify instant intima-media thickness changes (ΔIMT) in the common carotid artery (CCA) during cardiac cycle in order to assess atherosclerosis progression. Using a computerized semi-automated method, instant IMT changes were extracted in the two walls of the left CCA (240 consecutive patients) using B-mode ultrasound images. We found that CCA ΔIMT increased from 8 ± 4% of IMTmax in the controls to 15 ± 6% of IMTmax in the severe stenosis group. According to the multiple ordinal regression analysis, ΔIMT was associated with the severity of carotid artery stenosis (odds ratio [OR], 4.95; p < 0.001), independent of sex (OR, 1.11; p = 0.04), age (OR, 1.14; p < 0.001), body mass index; OR, 1.13; p = 0.036), hypertension (OR, 2.04; p < 0.001), diabetes (OR, 1.38; p = 0.045) and hyperlipidemia (OR, 1.54; p = 0.002). We concluded that increment of CCA ΔIMT during the cardiac cycle was strongly and independently associated with severity of carotid artery stenosis or atherosclerosis progression.
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Affiliation(s)
- Mehravar Rafati
- Department of Medical Physics and Radiology, Faculty of Paramedical Sciences, Kashan University of Medical Sciences, Kashan, Iran
| | | | - Hassan Moladoust
- Healthy Heart Research Center, School of Medicine, Guilan University of Medical Sciences, Rasht, Iran.
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Nagaraj Y, Hema Sai Teja A, Narasimhadhan AV. Automatic Segmentation of Intima Media Complex in Carotid Ultrasound Images Using Support Vector Machine. ARABIAN JOURNAL FOR SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING 2018. [DOI: 10.1007/s13369-018-3549-8] [Citation(s) in RCA: 6] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 01/19/2023]
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Nagaraj Y, Madipalli P, Rajan J, Kumar PK, Narasimhadhan A. Segmentation of intima media complex from carotid ultrasound images using wind driven optimization technique. Biomed Signal Process Control 2018. [DOI: 10.1016/j.bspc.2017.08.009] [Citation(s) in RCA: 16] [Impact Index Per Article: 2.7] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/27/2022]
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A Novel Segmentation Approach Combining Region- and Edge-Based Information for Ultrasound Images. BIOMED RESEARCH INTERNATIONAL 2017; 2017:9157341. [PMID: 28536703 PMCID: PMC5426079 DOI: 10.1155/2017/9157341] [Citation(s) in RCA: 19] [Impact Index Per Article: 2.7] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 09/09/2016] [Revised: 01/21/2017] [Accepted: 03/14/2017] [Indexed: 11/17/2022]
Abstract
Ultrasound imaging has become one of the most popular medical imaging modalities with numerous diagnostic applications. However, ultrasound (US) image segmentation, which is the essential process for further analysis, is a challenging task due to the poor image quality. In this paper, we propose a new segmentation scheme to combine both region- and edge-based information into the robust graph-based (RGB) segmentation method. The only interaction required is to select two diagonal points to determine a region of interest (ROI) on the original image. The ROI image is smoothed by a bilateral filter and then contrast-enhanced by histogram equalization. Then, the enhanced image is filtered by pyramid mean shift to improve homogeneity. With the optimization of particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm, the RGB segmentation method is performed to segment the filtered image. The segmentation results of our method have been compared with the corresponding results obtained by three existing approaches, and four metrics have been used to measure the segmentation performance. The experimental results show that the method achieves the best overall performance and gets the lowest ARE (10.77%), the second highest TPVF (85.34%), and the second lowest FPVF (4.48%).
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