CAROTID – A web-based platform for optimal personalized management of atherosclerotic patients

A novel computerized tool to stratify risk in carotid atherosclerosis using kinematic features of the arterial wall

“…Although different indices were identified as potential risk markers in the latest authors' works where only the patients from the St. Mary's [21] or the Attikon hospital were considered [22]; all studies revealed that the mobility features of the atherosclerotic lesion itself and healthy parts of the wall close to the lesion are equally important in risk stratification in the disease. Based on these results, plaque vulnerability seems to be significantly affected by dynamic phenomena which occur in a wide region around the atherosclerotic lesion.…”

“…In this study, these dynamic phenomena were captured in 2-D motion analysis. Although it has been recently suggested that 2-D motion carries sufficient information for characterizing the arterial wall [21], [22], [35], investigating the CAD contribution of out-of-plane motion constitutes an interesting future perspective.…”

“…A total of 56 elderly patients (aged 50-90) with established CA (diagnosed carotid stenosis >50%), who were referred to the St. Mary's Hospital of U.K. (N = 28) [21] and the Attikon General University Hospital of Greece (N = 28) [22] for carotid artery US scanning, were selected. Among those patients, 28 (St. Mary's: 18, Attikon: 10) had experienced an ischemic cerebrovascular event, i.e., stroke or transient ischemic attack ("symptomatic" group), while 28 patients (St. Mary's: 10, Attikon: 18) had no neurological symptoms ("asymptomatic" group), within a 6-month time period before the time of examination.…”

Galectin-3, Carotid Plaque Vulnerability, and Potential Effects of Statin Therapy

“…The recorded images were assessed to identify the one with the best quality, which was, then, transferred to a computer. A GSM measurement of the plaque area was automatically obtained using in house software developed in Matlab (version 2012b; MathWorks, Natick, USA), 10 which estimates the GSM score following a standardized approach proposed by Elatrozy et al 11 and has been commonly used by the scientific community. The technicians doing the image analyses were unaware of the clinical status of participants.…”

Marky: A tool supporting annotation consistency in multi-user and iterative document annotation projects

“…Therefore, the annotation of documents by domain experts is invaluable to provide for a ground truth against which to train and evaluate TM methods and algorithms. Depending on the application area, the creation of such semantically annotated corpora is a resource and time consuming activity [4,5]. Usually, multiple domain experts should review the documents and manual annotations should be compared.…”