Automatic detection of embolic signal for stroke prevention

Abstract

Transcranial Doppler (TCD) ultrasound is an essential tool in clinical diagnosis to determine the occurrence of embolism in stroke patients. However, it requires manual attention and the accuracy will deteriorate due to fatigue factor. Instead of depending on human observer as a gold standard to detect the emboli, this study proposes an automated emboli detection system based on three detection methods i.e. time-domain intensity, frequency-domain intensity and time-frequency intensity hybrid. Experimental studies of 240 samples of six data sets were employed. The performance evaluations of each method are measured in term of accuracy percentage and processing speed while human observation is also done as the golden standard for accuracy comparison. The best result is achieved by the time-frequency intensity hybrid method where 90.74 % of the embolic signals and 100 % of the non-embolic signals were successfully identified. The performance of this method is promising as the accuracy achieved by human observation was 87.45 and 100 % for embolic signals and non-embolic signals, respectively.