Longitudinal Assessment of Intracranial Plaque Growth in Patients With Intracranial Atherosclerotic Disease

Intracranial atherosclerotic disease (ICAD) is a condition that results in the narrowing of cerebral vessels due to the buildup of plaques which could subsequently lead to ischemic stroke. In this study we use a longitudinal dataset of vessel wall MRI scans from ICAD patients to observe differences in radiological features between progressing, stable and regressing plaques. We manually segmented plaques, classified them into progressing, stable or regressing plaques, and extracted radiomics features (RFs) from them. We then performed univariate statistics to determine differences in RFs between progressing, stable and regressing plaques. In a dataset of 78 plaques from 26 patients, we observed that there were 39 regressing, 18 stable and 21 progressing plaques. Through univariate statistics, we observed 27 RFs that were significantly different in at least one of the cohorts. Of these, 20 were extracted from the proton density weighted scan and 7 were extracted from the contrastenhanced scan. We also observed differences in RFs between stable and progressing plaques and progressing and regressing plaques. Finally, we performed a multivariate analysis to delineate progressing plaques from regressing and stable plaques.