Automated posteriorwall thickness measurement from B-mode ultrasound

In this paper, we present a robust algorithm to segment the posterior wall region and estimate wall thickness from parasternal long axis(PLAX) view cardiac US B-mode images. Posterior wall thickness (PWd), Septal wall thickness (SWTd) and Left ventricular Internal diameter(LVId) are used to detect and measure the extent of Left Ventricular Hypertrophy (LVH). Manual measurements of PWd suffers from large inter and intra observer variability due to weak endocardial boundary intertangled with speckle and poor contrast, movement of the fibrous structures like the chordae,papillary muscles and posterior mitral leaflet. The proposed algorithm seeks to address some of these issues by automating the measurement algorithm. The algorithm initially detects epicardial boundary by pericardium detection and later segments the endocardial boundary by a 1D active contour evolution. We have designed the algorithm on a pilot data set of 42 images and validated on 88 patient data sets.The measurement values are in excellent agreement with expert measurements with error = 2.06mm ± 1.5mm.