Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Medical imaging is an important tool that allows physicians to look inside human bodies. It may detect criticalillnesses at their most curable stage and, in many cases, when they are least costly to treat. Currently, variousimage modalities (e.g. ultrasound, Computer Tomography CT, Magnetic Resonance Imaging MRI, etc) areheavily used for clinical purposes. Ultrasound imaging provides an attractive tool for carotid arteryexamination. It allows clinicians to detect possible artery stenosis and to assess the risk of developing stokes.The main drawback of ultrasound imaging is the poor quality of the produced images. It takes a considerableeffort from clinicians to extract significant information about carotid artery contours, including the possibleexistence of plaque layers that may exist. This task requires a highly skilled clinician. Furthermore, manualextraction of carotid artery contours generates a result that is not reproducible. The main objective of thisresearch is to develop a Computer Aided Diagnostic (CAD) system to analyze carotid artery ultrasound imagesin an attempt to detect carotid artery stenosis and to assess the risk of developing strokes. The ultimate goal isto promote the use of the proposed system in clinical trials.