A CAD system for atherosclerotic plaque assessment.

Recently, several atherosclerotic plaque characterization methods were proposed based on plaque morphology assessed through 2D ultrasound. It is of extreme importance to establish an objective quantification measure which allows the physicians to determine the risk of plaque rupture, and thus, of brain stroke. Having these, sometimes complex, measures easily and quickly assessed might prove invaluable for the physician an patient alike. This paper is a first attempt to incorporate such scores in a user-friendly software platform for Computer-aided Diagnosis. This tool provides a way to objectively and interactively characterize the atherosclerotic plaque, to store relevant patient data and to use several processing tools to outline the plaque and compute different echogenicity measures. Combinations of these features are used to provide two objective measure with clinical significance, known as activity index and enhanced activity index.