A fully automated method for carotid plaques segmentation in ultrasound images based on motion estimation and level-set

Author

Galluzzo, Francesca ; De Marchi, Luca ; Testoni, Nicola ; Tabassian, Mahdi ; Speciale, Nicolo ; Masetti, Guido

Author_Institution

DEI-Dept. of Electr., Electron. & Inf. Eng. Guglielmo Marconi, Univ. of Bologna, Bologna, Italy

fYear

2014

fDate

3-6 Sept. 2014

Firstpage

2343

Lastpage

2346

Abstract

Ultrasound (US) guided carotid atherosclerosis diagnosis is based on the evaluation of the stenosis degree due to the presence of carotid plaques (CPs) and on CPs composition study. Accurate and automated CPs segmentation is essential to enable these evaluations. In this work, we present a fully automated CPs segmentation method based on level-set with an innovative initialization procedure that makes the approach completely user-independent by exploiting the carotid walls motion analysis. Performance were tested on 10 US image sequences of carotid artery and compared with manual contouring from an expert physician. Results show the effectiveness of our method at performing accurate CPs segmentation in US images without requiring any user intervention.

Keywords

biomedical ultrasonics; blood vessels; image segmentation; image sequences; medical image processing; motion estimation; CP composition; US image sequences; automated CP segmentation method; carotid artery; carotid plaque segmentation; carotid wall motion analysis; innovative initialization procedure; level-set; motion estimation; stenosis degree; ultrasound guided carotid atherosclerosis diagnosis; ultrasound images; Atherosclerosis; Blood; Carotid arteries; Image segmentation; Manuals; Motion segmentation; Ultrasonic imaging;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Ultrasonics Symposium (IUS), 2014 IEEE International

Conference_Location

Chicago, IL

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ULTSYM.2014.0584

Filename

6932103