Title :
Real-time extraction of carotid artery contours from ultrasound images
Author :
Abolmaesumi, P. ; Sirouspour, M.R. ; Salcudean, S.E.
Author_Institution :
Dept. of Electr. & Comput. Eng., British Columbia Univ., Vancouver, BC, Canada
Abstract :
This paper presents the development of a novel, fully-automatic tracking and segmentation system to extract the boundary of the carotid artery from ultrasound images in real-time. The center of the carotid artery is tracked using the Star algorithm. The stability of the Star algorithm has been improved by using a temporal Kalman filter. A spatial Kalman filter is used to estimate the carotid artery boundary. Since the method does not employ any numerical optimization, convergence is very fast. The stability and accuracy of the method is demonstrated by tracking the carotid artery over a 30 second sequence of ultrasound images taken during a carotid artery examination. An application of the tracking method to ultrasound image servoing is also presented
Keywords :
Kalman filters; biomedical ultrasonics; blood vessels; edge detection; medical image processing; numerical stability; real-time systems; tracking; Star algorithm; accuracy; convergence; fully-automatic segmentation system; fully-automatic tracking system; real-time carotid artery contour extraction; spatial Kalman filter; stability; temporal Kalman filter; ultrasound image servoing; ultrasound images; Carotid arteries; Gravity; Image edge detection; Image segmentation; Optimization methods; Real time systems; Stability; Target tracking; Ultrasonic imaging; Visual servoing;
Conference_Titel :
Computer-Based Medical Systems, 2000. CBMS 2000. Proceedings. 13th IEEE Symposium on
Conference_Location :
Houston, TX
Print_ISBN :
0-7695-0484-1
DOI :
10.1109/CBMS.2000.856897