Nonlinear analysis of carotid artery echographic images

Nonlinear analysis is applied to identifying complex spatial patterns in echographic images of normal and pathologic carotid arteries. Complexity and entropy measures of normal and atherosclerotic plaques are evaluated to characterise the space-temporal evolution of biological patterns. They are: correlation dimension, Lyapunov exponent and Kolmogorov entropy. The application of principal component analysis to such measures clusters data according to different atherosclerosis severity degrees, which are confirmed by histologic analysis.