Learning-based initialization for correntropy-based level sets to segment atherosclerotic plaque in ultrasound images

Carotid artery atherosclerosis is a significant cause of stroke. Ultrasound imaging has been widely used in the diagnosis of atherosclerosis. Therefore, segmenting the atherosclerotic carotid plaque in an ultrasound image is an important task. Accurate plaque segmentation is helpful for the measurement of carotid plaque burden. This study proposes an automatic method for atherosclerotic plaque segmentation by using correntropy-based level sets (CLS) with learning-based initialization. We introduce the CLS model, containing the point-based local bias-field corrected image fitting method and correntropy-based distance measurement, to overcome the limitations of the ultrasound images. A supervised learning algorithm is employed to solve the automatic initialization problem of the variational methods. The proposed atherosclerotic plaque segmentation method is validated on 29 carotid ultrasound images, obtaining a Dice ratio of 90.6 +/- 1.9% and an overlap index of 83.6 +/- 3.2%. Moreover, by comparing the standard deviation of each evaluation index, it can be found that the proposed method is more robust for segmenting the atherosclerotic plaque. Our work shows that our proposed method can be more helpful than other variational models for measuring the carotid plaque burden.