Chiu Bernard, Egger Micaela, Spence David, Parraga Grace, Fenster Aaron
Imaging Research Laboratories, Robarts Research Institute, London, Ontario, Canada.
Med Image Anal. 2008 Dec;12(6):676-88. doi: 10.1016/j.media.2008.04.002. Epub 2008 May 7.
Quantitative measurements of the progression (or regression) of carotid plaque burden are important in monitoring patients and evaluating new treatment options. 3D ultrasound (US) has been used to monitor the progression of carotid artery plaques in symptomatic and asymptomatic patients, and different methods of measuring various ultrasound phenotypes of atherosclerosis have been developed. We have developed a quantitative metric used to analyze changes in carotid plaque morphology from 3D US. This method matched the vertices on the carotid arterial wall surface with those on the luminal surface. Vessel-wall-plus-plaque thickness (VWT) was obtained by computing the distance between each corresponding pair, which was then superimposed on the arterial wall to produce the VWT map. Since the progression of plaque thickness is important in monitoring patients who are at risk for stroke, we also computed the change of VWT by comparing the VWT maps obtained for a patient at two different time points. In this paper, we propose a technique to flatten the 3D VWT and VWT-Change maps in an area-preserving manner, in order to facilitate the visualization and interpretation of these maps.
颈动脉斑块负荷进展（或消退）的定量测量对于监测患者和评估新的治疗方案至关重要。三维超声（US）已被用于监测有症状和无症状患者的颈动脉斑块进展情况，并且已经开发出了测量动脉粥样硬化各种超声表型的不同方法。我们已经开发出一种定量指标，用于分析三维超声检查中颈动脉斑块形态的变化。该方法将颈动脉壁表面的顶点与管腔表面的顶点进行匹配。血管壁加斑块厚度（VWT）通过计算每对对应点之间的距离获得，然后将其叠加在动脉壁上以生成VWT图。由于斑块厚度的进展对于监测中风风险患者很重要，我们还通过比较在两个不同时间点为患者获取的VWT图来计算VWT的变化。在本文中，我们提出了一种技术，以面积保持的方式将三维VWT和VWT变化图展平，以便于这些图的可视化和解读。
