A novel morphological-based carotid artery contour extraction

Ultrasound imaging provides an inexpensive tool for monitoring the blood flow within the carotid artery. The precipitation of plaque on the wall of the carotid artery has a great influence on the blood flow within the artery. Due to the poor quality and the presence of noise in ultrasound images, manual extraction of carotid artery walls is a tedious and time-consuming task. In this paper, a novel carotid artery contour extraction is proposed. The proposed scheme consists of four major stages. These stages are: pre-processing stage, quantization stage, morphological contour detection stage, and finally a contour enhancement stage. Experimental results over a set of sample images showed that the proposed scheme produces accurate contours. Thus the proposed scheme can be used as an effective tool in monitoring and detecting plaque precipitation on the walls of the carotid artery.