Carotid inter-adventitial diameter is more strongly related to plaque score than lumen diameter: An automated tool for stroke analysis

Purpose: To compare the strength of correlation between automatically measured carotid lumen diameter (LD) and interadventitial diameter (IAD) with plaque score (PS). Methods: Retrospective study on a database of 404 common carotid artery B-mode sonographic images from 202 diabetic patients. LD and IAD were computed automatically using an advanced computerized edge detection method and compared with two distinct manual measurements. PS was computed by adding the maximal thickness in millimeters of plaques in segments taken from the internal carotid artery, bulb, and common carotid artery on both sides. Results: The coefficient of correlation was 0.19 (p < 0.007) between LD and PS, and 0.25 (p < 0.0006) between IAD and PS. After excluding 10 outliers, coefficient of correlation was 0.25 (p < 0.0001) between LD and PS, and 0.38 (p < 0.0001) between IAD and PS. The precision of merit of automated versus the two manual measurements was 96.6% and 97.2% for LD, and 97.7% and 98.1%, for IAD, respectively. Conclusions: Our automated measurement system gave satisfying results in comparison with manual measurements. Carotid IAD was more strongly correlated to PS than carotid LD in this population sample of Japanese diabetic patients