Detection of arterial wall boundaries using an echo model composed of multiple ultrasonic pulses

The assessment of the intima-media thickness (IMT) of the carotid arterial wall, which is the most frequently used indicator to diagnose atherosclerosis by ultrasound, involves the measurement of the lumen-intima boundary (LIB) and media-adventitia boundary (MAB). In this study, using the mean squared error (MSE) method and by applying the template matching technique, an adaptive model of an ultrasonic echo, which is obtained from an ultrasonic pulse measured with a hydrophone, was fitted with the measured in vivo RF echo to estimate the boundaries of the carotid arterial wall. In the present study, the frequency and phase of the adaptive model were considered to improve the accuracy in the determination of the LIB and MAB. For a 7.5-mm-long short segment of the carotid artery in the longitudinal direction, the average IMTs estimated by the improved technique and the previous method were 502 61 and 558 120 m, respectively, showing a decrease in the standard deviation by the proposed method. Moreover, the result obtained by the improved technique presented only 0.4% difference between the automatically detected boundary and the manually detected boundary, which is smaller than that obtained by the previous method (10.7% difference). These results verified that the boundary detected by the improved technique was more accurate than that detected by the previous method.