Multi-Modality Atherosclerosis Imaging and Diagnosis

Stroke is one of the leading causes of death in the world, resulting mostly from the sudden ruptures of atherosclerosis carotid plaques. Understanding why and how plaque develops and ruptures requires a multi-disciplinary approach such as radiology, biomedical engineering, medical physics, software engineering, hardware engineering, pathological and histological imaging. Multi-Modality Atherosclerosis Imaging, Diagnosis and Treatment presents a new dimension of understanding Atherosclerosis in 2D and 3D. This book presents work on plaque stress analysis in order to provide a general framework of computational modeling with atherosclerosis plaques. New algorithms based on 3D and 4D Ultrasound are presented to assess the atherosclerotic disease as well as very recent advances in plaque multimodality image fusion analysis. The goal of Multi-Modality Atherosclerosis Imaging, Diagnosis and Treatment is to fuse information obtained from different 3D medical image modalities, such as 3D US, CT and MRI, providing the medical doctor with some sort of augmented reality information about the atherosclerotic plaque in order to improve the accuracy of the diagnosis. Analysis of the plaque dynamics along the cardiac cycle is also a valuable indicator for plaque instability assessment and therefore for risk stratification. 4D Ultrasound, a sequence of 3D reconstructions of the region of interest along the time, can be used for this dynamic analysis. Multimodality Image Fusion is a very appealing approach because it puts together the best characteristics of each modality, such as, the high temporal resolution of US and the high spatial resolutions of MRI and CT.