Enhanced Intraplaque Hemorrhage Delineation Method in Slab-Selection Phase-Sensitive Inversion-Recovery (SPI) Sequence with MRI

Dongxiang Xu¹, Jinnan Wang², Jie Sun, Chun Yuan

Atherosclerosis is the number one killer in the world. Previous studies have shown that intraplaque hemorrhage (IPH) into the carotid atherosclerotic plaque is a major factor causing plaque instability and progression. Thus, IPH is critical to evaluation of carotid atherosclerotic disease. The Slab-selection Phase-sensitive Inversion-recovery MRI sequence has improved IPH evaluation compared to others imaging sequences. Using this technique, we developed an enhanced mean-shift model to auto-detect IPH and applied it to in vivo MRI data. The statistical analysis results show this algorithm has 100% sensitivity, 95% specificity and a high correlation with human evaluation