Semantic Segmentation with DenseNets for Carotid Artery Ultrasound Plaque Segmentation and CIMT estimation

•A novel single-step approach for automatic carotid artery image interpretation.•The method is also accurate and objective for CIMT estimation and plaque detection.•The proposed method is easily extensible to different CA territories.•The CIMT estimation and plaque detection have been evaluated in a very large data set.•The robustness and generalization have been proven with two different data sets.