Loizou C P, Murray V, Pattichis M S, Pantziaris M, Nicolaides A N, Pattichis C S
Departement of Computer Science, School of Sciences, Intercollege, 92 Ayias Phylaxeos Street, P. O. Box 51604, CY-3507 Limassol, Cyprus.
Departement of Electrical Engineering, Universidad de Ingenieria y Tecnologia, 2221 Lima, Peru ; Departement of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM 87131, USA.
Int J Biomed Imaging. 2014;2014:518414. doi: 10.1155/2014/518414. Epub 2014 Mar 9.
The intima-media thickness (IMT) of the common carotid artery (CCA) is widely used as an early indicator of cardiovascular disease (CVD). Typically, the IMT grows with age and this is used as a sign of increased risk of CVD. Beyond thickness, there is also clinical interest in identifying how the composition and texture of the intima-media complex (IMC) changed and how these textural changes grow into atherosclerotic plaques that can cause stroke. Clearly though texture analysis of ultrasound images can be greatly affected by speckle noise, our goal here is to develop effective despeckle noise methods that can recover image texture associated with increased rates of atherosclerosis disease. In this study, we perform a comparative evaluation of several despeckle filtering methods, on 100 ultrasound images of the CCA, based on the extracted multiscale Amplitude-Modulation Frequency-Modulation (AM-FM) texture features and visual image quality assessment by two clinical experts. Texture features were extracted from the automatically segmented IMC for three different age groups. The despeckle filters hybrid median and the homogeneous mask area filter showed the best performance by improving the class separation between the three age groups and also yielded significantly improved image quality.
颈总动脉（CCA）的内膜中层厚度（IMT）被广泛用作心血管疾病（CVD）的早期指标。通常，IMT会随着年龄增长，这被视为CVD风险增加的一个迹象。除了厚度之外，确定内膜中层复合体（IMC）的组成和质地如何变化以及这些质地变化如何发展成可导致中风的动脉粥样硬化斑块也具有临床意义。然而，超声图像的纹理分析显然会受到斑点噪声的极大影响，我们在此的目标是开发有效的去斑噪声方法，以恢复与动脉粥样硬化疾病发生率增加相关的图像纹理。在本研究中，我们基于提取的多尺度调幅调频（AM-FM）纹理特征以及两位临床专家的视觉图像质量评估，对100张CCA超声图像上的几种去斑滤波方法进行了比较评估。从自动分割的IMC中提取了三个不同年龄组的纹理特征。混合中值去斑滤波器和均匀掩膜区域滤波器通过改善三个年龄组之间的类别分离表现出了最佳性能，并且图像质量也有显著提高。
