Multi-Feature Fusion Method for Identifying Carotid Artery Vulnerable Plaque

Abstract Purpose Vulnerable plaque of carotid atherosclerosis is prone to rupture, which can easily lead to acute cardiovascular and cerebrovascular accidents. Accurate identification of the vulnerable plaque is a challenging task, especially on limited datasets. Methods This paper proposes a multi-feature fusion method to identify high-risk plaque, in which three types of features are combined, i.e. global features of carotid ultrasound images, echo features of regions of interests (ROI) and expert knowledge from ultrasound reports. Due to the fusion of three types of features, more critical features for identifying high-risk plaque are included in the feature set. Therefore, better performance can be achieved even on limited datasets. Results From testing all combinations of three types of features, the results showed that the accuracy of using all three types of features is the highest. The experiments also showed that the performance of the proposed method is better than other plaque classification methods and classical Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) on the Plaque dataset. Conclusion The proposed method helped to build a more complete feature set so that the machine learning models could identify vulnerable plaque more accurately even on datasets with poor quality and small scale.