Maria Rosario Lopez Gonzalez1, William
Matthew Holmes2, William Stewart3, Keith W. Muir4,
Barrie Condon, George Welch5, Kirsten Forbes
1SINAPSE, Clinical Physics, University
of Glasgow, Glasgow, United Kingdom; 2GEMRIC, Wellcome Surgical
Institute, Faculty of Medicine, University of
Glasgow, Glasgow, United Kingdom; 3Department of
Neuropathology, Institute of Neurological Sciences, Southern General
Hospital, Glasgow, United Kingdom; 4Division of Clinical
Neurosciences, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, United Kingdom; 5Vascular
surgery, Southern General Hospital, Glasgow, United Kingdom
In-vivo
3T MR and CTA images were acquired of symptomatic stroke patients. These
images show that most of the patients presented high degrees of
atherosclerotic carotid plaque. To help to identify unstable and vulnerable
plaques, segmentation of the different plaque components was carried out by
using a semiautomatic thresholding method. Half of the patients underwent
surgical excision of the carotid plaque. The specimens obtained were imaged
in a 7T scanner. The specimens were sectioned and stained with
heamatoxylin-eosin and Elastin van Gieson. Correlation of the MRI datasets
and Histology was carried out.