Diagnosis of Coronary Artery Diseases and Carotid Atherosclerosis Using Intravascular Ultrasound Images

Abstract

Cardiovascular diseases are of paramount importance as large number of deaths is caused, if not diagnosed and treated at the right time. Ultrasound examination complements other imaging modalities such as radiography, and allows more definite diagnostic tests to be conducted. This modality is non-invasive in nature, widely used in diagnosis of cardiovascular diseases. Recently, two leading ultrasound based techniques are used for the assessment of atherosclerosis: B-mode ultrasound used in measurement of carotid artery intima thickness and intravascular ultrasound. These techniques provide images in real time, portable, substantially lower in cost and no harmful ionizing radiations are used in imaging. The processing of ultrasound image takes a major role in the accurate diagnosis of the disease level. The diagnostic accuracy depends on the time to read the image and the experience of the practitioner to interpret the correct information. Computer aided methods for the analysis of the intravascular ultrasound images can assist in better measurement of plaque deposition in the coronary artery. In this paper, the level of plaque deposition is identified using Otsu’s segmentation method and classification of plaque deposition level is performed using Back Propagation Network (BPN) and Support Vector Machine (SVM). The result shows SVM classifies more significantly in comparison with the BPN network.