Non-invasive ultrasound 3D arterial modelling

Feature extraction has provided a basis for selecting data in an ultrasound image as arterial wall data. This basis is a circle which best approximates the edge data in the region of the artery. The Canny edge operator has been used in conjunction with the Hough transform to extract a circular approximation to an artery and with careful choice of the feature extraction process, can be made to select the appropriate circle which best approximates the artery itself. This provides a basis for filtering the wall data in the arterial image and can provide an approximation even when wall data is missing. This leads to a template which with others extracted from a number of arterial slices provides a 3D carotid model which is at present displayed by oblique projection. This needed particular refinement to handle the bifurcation where successive templates can obscure the other branch. These new techniques have been demonstrated to extract arterial wall data and provide 3D pictures for subjects´ arteries in in vivo studies