Three-Dimensional Characterization of Carotid Plaque Structure and Deformation with Non-Invasive Ultrasound Imaging

We have shown that by using a directionally sensitive, edge preserving filter on B-mode U/S images of ex-vivo carotid vessels we can obtain 3D edge fields of the ves-sel boundaries that are more distinct than edges from con-ventional gradient calculation. With these enhanced edge fields we can then extract the 3D vessel boundaries. Bland-Altman plots show that our method for edge field enhance-ment and boundary extraction yields more reproducible IMT measurements than the gold standard of manual point selection. Lastly, we demonstrate a robust estimator of ve-locity and strain that exhibits enhanced performance over conventional methods. 1