Wall Motion Analysis of Common Carotid Artery and Detection of Abnormality Using Transverse Ultrasound Images

In this study, wall motion analysis of common carotid artery has been done to classify images as normal or abnormal. B mode transverse ultrasound images of common carotid artery have been obtained for 100 healthy subjects and 100 subjects with known cardiovascular complaints. The diastolic and systolic blood pressures of subjects were also measured before and after image acquisition and are averaged. The quality of the images has been enhanced by image normalization process. Block matching technique was used to track the movement of the carotid wall. The displacements in x and y directions are obtained and are averaged over three cardiac cycles. The stiffness indices have been obtained for all subjects from the displacements and blood pressure. The mean stiffness for different age groups of the healthy volunteers vary from 4.5 to 7.6. For subjects with cardiac complaints, the mean stiffness index vary from 8.01 to 18.86 for different age groups. The back propagation algorithm has been used to train neural network to classify the subjects as normal or abnormal.