Anomaly Detection and Segmentation in Carotid Ultrasound Images Using Hybrid Stable AnoGAN

Detecting and segmenting arterial plaques in ultrasound images is essential for the early diagnosis and prevention of cardiovascular diseases. This paper presents Hybrid Stable AnoGAN (HS-AnoGAN), an enhanced anomaly detection framework based on AnoGAN (Anomaly Generative Adversarial Network), which utilizes generative adversarial learning to model normal anatomical structures and identify abnormal regions indicative of pathology. The proposed approach introduces key improvements, including direct latent space encoding, hybrid reconstruction loss, feature matching in the discriminator, and adaptive thresholding, leading to more precise anomaly localization. Additionally, spectral normalization and Wasserstein loss with gradient penalty are incorporated to improve training stability and prevent mode collapse. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to apply anomaly detection techniques for arterial plaque detection and segmentation in ultrasound images. Comparative experiments demonstrate that HS-AnoGAN outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving a 9.8% increase in detection accuracy, and a 7.5% enhancement in Dice score for segmentation quality. These results highlight the effectiveness of HS-AnoGAN in improving both plaque detection and segmentation in ultrasound imaging, making it a promising tool for clinical applications.