AbstractsMedical & Health Science

abstract__Abstract__ Intraplaque neovascularization (IPN) has been presented as an important biomarker for progressive atherosclerotic disease and plaque vulnerability in several pathological studies. Therefore, quantification of IPN may allow early prediction of plaque at risk of rupture and thus prevention of future cardiovascular events such as stroke. Contrast enhanced ultrasound (CEUS) enables us to detect and visualize IPN by use of ultrasound contrast agents. So, the degree of IPN can potentially be measured by quantitative imaging biomarkers derived from CEUS. Since quantification tools for IPN are scarce, so far mainly visual IPN scoring on CEUS clips has been used to assess IPN, which is subjective and tedious. Currently available commercial tools for contrast quantification, e.g. QLAB region of interest (ROI) quantification tool (Philips Medical Systems, Bothell, USA) and VueBox (Bracco Suisse SA, Geneva, Switzerland), are not suitable for quantitative analysis of IPN. These commercial quantification tools have been developed mainly for time intensity curve analysis (TIC) of large organs such as heart, liver and prostate, not for plaques. Plaques are very small and intermittently perfused. Therefore, the perfusion characteristics of plaques are quite different from those of large organs and TIC analysis as applied in large well-perfused organs is not applicable. Some IPN quantification approaches have been reported but they suffer from a number of limitations such as imaging artifacts and no or imperfect motion compensation. In this thesis work, we avoided the known limitations of IPN quantification methods reported in previous studies and developed and evaluated specialized IPN analysis tools for carotid CEUS image sequences.markdown