Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the leading cause of mortality yet largely
preventable, but the key to prevention is to identify at-risk individuals
before adverse events. For predicting individual CVD risk, carotid intima-media
thickness (CIMT), a noninvasive ultrasound method, has proven to be valuable,
offering several advantages over CT coronary artery calcium score. However,
each CIMT examination includes several ultrasound videos, and interpreting each
of these CIMT videos involves three operations: (1) select three end-diastolic
ultrasound frames (EUF) in the video, (2) localize a region of interest (ROI)
in each selected frame, and (3) trace the lumen-intima interface and the
media-adventitia interface in each ROI to measure CIMT. These operations are
tedious, laborious, and time consuming, a serious limitation that hinders the
widespread utilization of CIMT in clinical practice. To overcome this
limitation, this paper presents a new system to automate CIMT video
interpretation. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that the suggested system
significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. The superior
performance is attributable to our unified framework based on convolutional
neural networks (CNNs) coupled with our informative image representation and
effective post-processing of the CNN outputs, which are uniquely designed for
each of the above three operations.Comment: J. Y. Shin, N. Tajbakhsh, R. T. Hurst, C. B. Kendall, and J. Liang.
Automating carotid intima-media thickness video interpretation with
convolutional neural networks. CVPR 2016, pp 2526-2535; N. Tajbakhsh, J. Y.
Shin, R. T. Hurst, C. B. Kendall, and J. Liang. Automatic interpretation of
CIMT videos using convolutional neural networks. Deep Learning for Medical
Image Analysis, Academic Press, 201