A team of scientists led by Anant Madabhushi, associate professor of biomedical engineering, developed computational image analysis and pattern-recognition methods to distinguish vulnerable from stable plaque in the carotid on MRI images. In a study, recently published in the journal Medical Physics, Madabhushi and his team were able to achieve above 90 percent accuracy in distinguishing the two kinds of plaque.
Madabhushi’s team, in collaboration with Euclid Bioimaging and principal investigator Andrew Buckner, has been awarded a two-year, $750,000 small-business innovation research Phase II grant from the National Science Foundation to develop and extend these methods for use in humans.