| Abstract: | Spectral analysis of ultrasound radiofrequency backscatter has the potential to identify intercostal blood vessels during ultrasound-guided placement of paravertebral nerve blocks and intercostal nerve blocks. Autoregressive models were used for spectral estimation, and bandwidth, autoregressive order and region-of-interest size were evaluated. Eight spectral parameters were calculated and used to create random forests. An autoregressive order of 10, bandwidth of 6?dB and region-of-interest size of 1.0?mm resulted in the minimum out-of-bag error. An additional random forest, using these chosen values, was created from 70% of the data and evaluated independently from the remaining 30% of data. The random forest achieved a predictive accuracy of 92% and Youden's index of 0.85. These results suggest that spectral analysis of ultrasound radiofrequency backscatter has the potential to identify intercostal blood vessels. (jokling@siue.edu) © 2018 World Federation for Ultrasound in Medicine and Biology |
