Automatic measurement of the artery intima-media thickness with image empirical mode decomposition

Artery intima-media thickness (IMT) is a useful marker for diagnosis of atherosclerosis. In this paper, we have proposed a new scheme for detection and measurement of the IMT in medical ultrasound images, in which the image empirical mode decomposition (IEMD) is used as the detection part as well as adaptive gray stretching, and watershed segmentation for extracting boundary of intima. To measure the IMT, a new method combing with regional positioning and boundary fitting is adopted. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme can yield a good measurement result, and the calculation time can satisfy the practical requirement. Moreover, our method needs less manual input than others.