Reproducibility of sonographic measurements of carotid intima-media thickness

Abstract

The results of this study show that carotid IMT measurement using THI sonography and a standardized protocol is accurate and reproducible.

Carotid intima-media thickness and hemodynamic parameters: reproducibility of manual measurements with Doppler ultrasound

“…IMTmean was always more reproducible than IMTmax, probably because it is just one measurement, it may be more variable than IMTmean [9]. IMTmax is the normal approach in our department and has also been the reference parameter in some studies [20]. However, IMTmean (averaged three IMT measurements in the distal CCA centimeter) is recommended by the ASE for IMT manual quantification [9] and, as our results corroborate, less variable [15,21].…”

“…A number of previous papers have analyzed the reproducibility of manual and automatized carotid IMT measurements [5,11,12,14,20,21]. However, only a few made just a correlation analysis and agreement was not actually assessed [11,12,20]. For other researchers, correlation based on coefficients of variation or difference of means were acceptable [14,21] or very high [5], but the interobserver agreement was not studied in the latter.…”

“…In this scenario, the analysis of carotid US agreements becomes relevant. A number of previous papers have analyzed the reproducibility of manual and automatized carotid IMT measurements [5,11,12,14,20,21]. However, only a few made just a correlation analysis and agreement was not actually assessed [11,12,20].…”

Frequency-domain active contours solution to evaluate intima–media thickness of the common carotid artery

“…Several manual measurement procedures appear in medical bibliography [2,3,6], but in order to consider IMT as a reliable indicator of atherosclerosis, the measurement protocol must prove its repeatability and reproducibility [2,7]. Particularly, the method here proposed is based on the repeatable and reproducible protocol used by the Radiology Department from Hospital Universitario Virgen de la Arrixaca [7], which provided the images to develop our method.…”

“…The IMT is defined as the distance from the lumen-intima to the media-adventitia interface at far wall. The interfaces to be detected present a bright-dark-bright pattern corresponding to the intima-media-adventitia layers (see In the manual procedure [7] an expert observer marks from one to three pair of points delimiting IMT around 1 cm after the carotid bulb. The carotid bulb is located on the left of the image in all cases.…”