Carotid Atherosclerotic Plaque Progression and Change in Plaque Composition Over Time: A 5-Year Follow-Up Study Using Serial CT Angiography

Explanation of the method of semiautomated registration of vessel wall range of interest. 3D reconstructions of the lumen segmentations of a carotid bifurcation at FU (A) and at BL (B). Lumen segmentation is semiautomatically generated after clicking 3 initialization points in the CCA, the ICA, and the ECA, respectively (red dots), separately in both FU and BL datasets. From this lumen segmentation, CLLs are extracted (orange line). On the FU CTA, the vessel range containing atherosclerotic plaque is defined by clicking another set of initialization points (blue dots). The absolute distances along the CLL between the 3 blue points are measured and copied to the CLL of the BL CTA (yellow line), which define the range on axial images to be analyzed by the automated plaque segmentation tool (green dots).