DualPlaqueNet with dual-branch structure and attention mechanism for carotid plaque semantic segmentation and size prediction.

Background: With global aging and lifestyle changes, carotid atherosclerotic plaques are a major cause of cerebrovascular disease and ischemic stroke. However, ultrasound images suffer from high noise, low contrast, and blurred edges, making it difficult for traditional image processing methods to accurately extract plaque information. Objective: To establish a deep learning-based DualPlaqueNet model for semantic segmentation and size prediction of plaques in carotid ultrasound images, thereby providing comprehensive and accurate auxiliary information for clinical risk assessment and personalized diagnosis and treatment. Methods: DualPlaqueNet uses a dual-branch architecture combined with attention mechanisms and joint loss functions to optimize segmentation and regression. Notably, a multi-layer one-dimensional convolutional structure is introduced within the Efficient Channel Attention (ECA) module. The original dataset contained 287 carotid ultrasound images from patients at Zhengzhou First People's Hospital, which were divided into training, validation, and test sets. Model training, validation, and testing were performed after preprocessing and data augmentation of the training set. Its performance was compared with three other models. Results: In the plaque semantic segmentation task, DualPlaqueNet outperformed the other three models across all metrics, achieving MIoU of 88.91 ± 1.027 (%), IoU (excluding background) of 88.22 ± 1.065 (%), DSC of 89.95 ± 1.102 (%), and Accuracy of 95.98 ± 0.073 (%). For plaque size prediction, this model demonstrated lower MSE and MAE, along with a higher coefficient of determination Conclusion: The dual-branch design and attention mechanisms of DualPlaqueNet effectively address the challenges of ultrasound images, achieving precise segmentation and size prediction, demonstrating its potential as an auxiliary tool for future clinical applications.