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Publication

Deep Learning for Cardiovascular Risk Assessment: Proxy Features from Carotid Sonography as Predictors of Arterial Damage

Christoph Peter Balada; Aida Romano-Martinez; Vincent ten Cate; Katharina Geschke; Jonas Tesarz; Paul Claßen; Alexander K Schuster; Dativa Tibyampansha; Karl-Patrik Kresoja; Philipp S Wild; others
In: Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Medical Image Understanding and Analysis (MIUA-2025), LNCS, Springer Nature, 2025.

Abstract

This study investigates hypertension as a visual marker of individual vascular damage, which can signal an elevated risk of major cardiovascular events. By leveraging machine learning, we aim to identify such damage early and gain insight into a patient’s arterial health. We adapted the VideoMAE deep learning model—originally designed for video classification—by fine-tuning it for ultrasound imaging applications. The model was trained and tested using a dataset comprising over 31,000 carotid sonography videos sourced from the Gutenberg Health Study (15,010 participants), one of the largest prospective population health studies. This adaptation facilitates the classification of individuals as hypertensive or non-hypertensive (74.6\% validation accuracy), functioning as a proxy for detecting visual arterial damage. We demonstrate that our machine learning model effectively captures visual features that provide valuable insights into an individual’s overall cardiovascular health.

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