This chapter presents methods that can be used for evaluation of high cerebrovascular risk using the texture and morphological appearance of plaques in combination with a number of clinical factors for the estimation of the stroke risk. Images and results presented are based on the analysis of images that were collected through a multicenter cohort study of patients with asymptomatic ICA called Asymptomatic Carotid Stenosis and Risk of Stroke (ACSRS).

Chapter Contents:

• 21.1 Introduction
• 21.2 Collected data
• 21.3 Imaging feature sets
• 21.3.1 Statistical features
• 21.3.2 Spatial gray level dependence matrices
• 21.3.3 Morphological analysis
• 21.4 Risk modeling
• 21.4.1 Classifiers
• 21.4.2 Evaluation
• 21.5 Results
• 21.6 Conclusions
• References

Inspec keywords: image texture; diseases; biomedical ultrasonics; medical image processing; blood vessels

Other keywords: atherosclerotic plaques; morphological appearance; ultrasound asymptomatic carotid plaque image analysis; cerebrovascular risk; asymptomatic carotid stenosis; asymptomatic internal carotid artery; texture appearance; stroke risk

Subjects: Sonic and ultrasonic radiation (biomedical imaging/measurement); Optical, image and video signal processing; Sonic and ultrasonic radiation (medical uses); Biology and medical computing; Computer vision and image processing techniques; Patient diagnostic methods and instrumentation; Sonic and ultrasonic applications