Department of Medical Engineering & Physics

Technical Services - Products - IMT (Intima-Media Thickness) Software

[Warnings]   [Introduction]   [Main Features]   [Downloads]

Warning!

The software is distributed solely for the purposes of documentation and is not designed to support clinical decisions in the treatment and diagnosis of humans.

Introduction

The Intima-Media Thickness (IMT) measurement software is a tool that can be used to simultaneously measure the IMT and Lumen diameter of the carotid artery in B-Mode ultrasound images for either a single frame or for a sequence of frames across multiple cardiac cycles.  Images can be analysed in DICOM format or other formats such as BMP, JPEG and TIFF.  The software has been optimised so that little or no Observer intervention is required, resulting in greater accuracy and reproducibility.  A database is used for storing all results with user friendly and powerful query tools to search the data, which can then be exported to other software packages for analysis.

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Main Features

• Analyse a Single Frame or a Sequence of frames across multiple cardiac cycles.
  
  
• Simultaneous measurement of IMT and Lumen Diameter.
  
  
• Can analyse images in DICOM format for higher quality.
  
  
• Backwards compatible with previous techniques of analysing BMP, JPEG, TIFF images.
  
  
• Accurate tracking of arterial walls to minimise Observer intervention.
  
  
• Powerful and easy to use editing tools for removing bad data points/frames.
  
  
• Up to six studies can be combined into a single series for improved reproducibility.
  
  
• Ability to compare position of previous Region of Interest for returning patients, so that the same section of artery is analysed again.
  
  
• Extensive information saved for each study to a database, including Patient and Equipment Information, individual study results and series results.
  
  
• Powerful and easy to use query tools for searching the database.
  
  
• Online help available in the form of a WinHelp file version of the manual.

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Image Select Interface

Displays details and thumbnail images of DICOM files as well as the traditional BMP, JPEG and TIF files.

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Frame Selection Interface

Full VCR controls and Indexing for reviewing a DICOM file and selecting either a single frame (on an R-wave) or a Sequence of Frames for IMT analysis.

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Calibration

Used to calibrate the image if necessary (ie BMP files etc..) and select the portion of artery to analyse.

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Calculate IMT Interface

This is an example of a 200 frame (four second clip) Sequence Analysis clearly showing the Lumen diameter changing over the cardiac cycle.

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Series Summary

This interface allows the complete Study Information to be entered and then each study can be added to the Series where a running average is kept of the various parameters.

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Query ROI

Users can quickly and easily build up and edit complex query statements with the click of a button and then decide what data they want returned, by adding fields to the Results table.

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View ROI’s

Compare and place the position of an ROI from a previous study for improved reproducibility.

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Downloads

Operator Manual (.pdf, 2.2MB)

Note:  These publications are supplied in Adobe® Acrobat® Portable Document Format (PDF) and will take a few minutes to download.  They may be viewed using the free Adobe Reader® software, available from Adobe's web site.  The Reader is available for Apple Macintosh, MS Windows, Palm, PocketPC and various Unix operating systems.

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