A novel method for characterizing and visualizing the progression of waves along the walls of the carotid artery is presented.The\nnewapproach is noninvasive and able to simultaneously capture the spatial and the temporal propagation ofwavy patterns along the\nwalls of the carotid artery in a completely automated manner. Spatiotemporal and spatiospectral 2D maps describing these patterns\n(in both the spatial and the frequency domains, resp.) were generated and analyzed by visual inspection as well as automatic feature\nextraction and classification. Three categories of cases were considered: pathological elderly, healthy elderly, and healthy young\ncases. Automatic differentiation, between cases of these three categories, was achieved with a sensitivity of 97.1% and a specificity\nof 74.5%. Two features were proposed and computed to measure the homogeneity of the spatiospectral 2D map which presents the\nspectral characteristics of the carotid artery wall�s wavymotion patternwhich are related to the physical,mechanical (e.g., elasticity),\nand physiological properties and conditions along the artery.These results are promising and confirmthe potential of the proposed\nmethod in providing useful information which can help in revealing the physiological condition of the cardiovascular system.
Loading....