Abstract
Carotid and coronary vascular problems, such as heart attack or stroke, are often originated in vulnerable plaques. Hence, the accurate characterization of plaque echogenic contents could help in diagnosing such lesions.
The Rayleigh distribution is widely accepted as an appropriate model to describe plaque morphology although it is known that other more complex distributions depending on multiple parameters are usually needed whenever the tissues show significant heterogeneity.In this chapter a new model to describe the tissue echo-morphology by using a mixture of Rayleigh distribution is described. This model, called Rayleigh Mixture Model (RMM), combines the robustness of a mixture model with the mathematical simplicity and adequacy of the Rayleigh distributions to deal with the speckle multiplicative noise that corrupts the ultrasound images.
The method for the automatic estimation of the RMM mixture parameters by using the Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm is described.The performance of the proposed model is evaluated with a database of in-vitro IVUS samples. We show that the mixture coefficients and Rayleigh parameters explicitly derived from the mixture model are able to accurately describe different plaque types and to significantly improve the characterization performance of an already existing methodology.
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Seabra, J., Ciompi, F., Radeva, P., Sanches, J.M. (2012). A Rayleigh Mixture Model for IVUS Imaging. In: Sanches, J., Laine, A., Suri, J. (eds) Ultrasound Imaging. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-1180-2_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-1180-2_2
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