Atherosclerotic Carotid Plaque AM-FM Texture Feature Variability in Ultrasound Video

The objective of this work was to investigate the Amplitude Modulation - Frequency Modulation (AM-FM) texture feature variability in carotid ultrasound video during the cardiac cycle at systole and diastole. The goal here was to identify AM-FM features that are associated with increased risk of stroke. We computed the instantaneous amplitude, instantaneous phase and the magnitude of instantaneous frequency to extract plaque histogram features. A small dataset of 5 asymptomatic and 3 symptomatic videos were analyzed. Selected AM-FM plaque histogram texture features extracted during the cardiac cycle at the systolic and diastolic states were statistically significantly different between asymptomatic and symptomatic videos. However, further evaluation with more subjects needs to be carried out to exploit the usefulness of the proposed analysis in the clinical context.