Segmenting the carotid-artery wall in ultrasound image sequences with a dual-resolution U-net

Thickening of intima-media complex in the common carotid artery is a biomarker of atherosclerosis. To automatically measure this thickness, we propose a region-based segmentation method, involving a supervised deep-learning approach based on the dilated U-net architecture, named caroSegDeep. It was trained and evaluated using 5-fold cross-validation on two open-access databases containing a total of 2676 annotated images. Compared with the methods already evaluated on these databases, caroSegDeep established a new benchmark and achieved a mean absolute error twice smaller than the inter-observer variability.