Three-dimensional characterization of carotid plaque structure and deformation with noninvasive 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 vessel boundaries that are more distinct than edges from conventional 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 enhancement and boundary extraction yields more reproducible IMT measurements than the gold standard of manual point selection. Lastly, we demonstrate a robust estimator of velocity and strain that exhibits enhanced performance over conventional methods.