PROCESSING ULTRASOUND IMAGES

摘要

A key indicator in the onset of Cardiovascular Disease (CVD) is abnormalities in the inner most layer of the arterial wall, i.e. the endothelial cell layer. Dysfunction of this endothelium is one of the earliest events in the development of CVD. Disclosed herein are inventive methods for processing an ultrasound image of a vascular tissue and an inventive method of segmenting the tissue for detecting sub abnormalities. The processing method entails: segmenting the ultrasound image into regions corresponding to vascular tissue lumen and vascular tissue; determining the diameter of the vascular tissue lumen at a plurality of points; determining an inter-percentile range of the plurality of diameters; and calculating a statistic of centre of the plurality of diameters from the inter-percentile range of the plurality of diameters.