Early Diagnosis of Carotid Stenosis by Ultrasound Doppler Investigations: A Classification Method for the Hemodynamic Parameter

Abstract

Pulsed Wave Doppler (PWD) is a traditional ultrasound technique used for the diagnosis of cardiovascular disease. The conventional diagnostic method is based on hemodynamic parameters obtained from the PW spectrum. However, it relies on the clinical experience of sonographers, and especially focusing on severe carotid stenosis. This paper proposes a classification method for the hemodynamic parameter using the RUSBoost algorithm. The proposed method improves the performance of RUSBoost by setting the empirical weight of each sample. The experimental results show that the proposed method reaches the accuracy of 90.1%, the sensitivity of 70%, and the specificity of 94%, which are 4%, 6%, and 2% higher than the original RUSBoost respectively. In addition, the proposed method is objective, since the empirical weights are computed based on Mahalanobis distance without any expert input. It can be used for the early detection of cardiovascular disease.