A CUBS-Compatible Ultrasound Morphology and Uncertainty-Aware Baseline for Carotid Intima-Media Segmentation and Preliminary Risk Prediction

TL;DR

This paper introduces AtheroFlow-XNet, a morphology- and uncertainty-aware ultrasound segmentation model for carotid arteries, providing a baseline for risk prediction and highlighting the importance of morphology in vascular analysis.

Contribution

The study presents a novel CUBS-compatible model that integrates uncertainty estimation and clinical variables for carotid segmentation and risk assessment.

Findings

Achieved Dice coefficient of 0.7930 for segmentation.

Area under ROC curve of 0.6910 for risk prediction.

Uncertainty maps effectively highlight ambiguous wall regions.

Abstract

Carotid atherosclerosis is a major contributor to ischemic stroke and transient ischemic attack. Conventional ultrasound assessment is commonly based on intima-media thickness, plaque appearance, stenosis degree, and peak systolic velocity, but these morphology- and velocity-based indicators may not fully capture patient-specific vascular risk. This study presents AtheroFlow-XNet, a CUBS-compatible ultrasound morphology and uncertainty-aware learning baseline for carotid intima-media segmentation and preliminary risk prediction. Using the Carotid Ultrasound Boundary Study dataset, manual lumen-intima and media-adventitia boundary annotations were converted into dense intima-media masks for supervised segmentation. Clinical variables were incorporated into an auxiliary risk-prediction branch, and Monte Carlo dropout was used for uncertainty-aware inference. The model was evaluated using a patient-level train-validation-test split with 1,522 training images, 326 validation images, and 328 testing images. The proposed model achieved a Dice coefficient of 0.7930 for LI-MA mask segmentation, a segmentation loss of 0.2359, and an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.6910 for preliminary risk prediction. Qualitative results showed that predicted masks were generally aligned with manual annotations, while uncertainty maps highlighted ambiguous wall-boundary regions. These results suggest that ultrasound-derived carotid morphology can support automated wall analysis and uncertainty-aware interpretation. Since CUBS does not provide Doppler waveforms or CFD-derived hemodynamic biomarkers, this work should be interpreted as a reproducible morphology-driven baseline. Future work will incorporate Doppler-derived flow profiles, patient-specific vascular reconstruction, and CFD-based wall shear biomarkers.