Patent ID: 8660326

Claim:
An image processing method for estimating risk of rupture of an atheromatous plaque, comprising: a step of receiving an image called an “elastogram” depicting internal deformations resulting from compression of a blood vessel tissue analyzed as function of blood pressure, a pre-segmentation step of the elastogram to obtain a pre-segmented image comprising a plurality of zones, and a computing step of an elasticity image showing the elasticity of at least one region in the elastogram, the region corresponding to a zone selected from among the plurality of zones of the pre-segmented image, and the elasticity image enabling the user to estimate the risk of rupture of an atheromatous plaque, a method wherein: first, the pre-segmentation step is performed considering the tissue to be an incompressible elastic solid so as to determine the gradient of Young's modulus as being equal to the sum of the gradient of the Lagrange multiplier and a space-dependent vector of the form H=−[ε] −1 div [ε], where [ε] is the deformation matrix, [ε] −1 the inverse of the deformation matrix, and div [ε] is the divergence of the deformation matrix, second, the pre-segmentation step comprises the determination of the contours of each zone of the plurality of zones by means of said space-dependent vector.