A variational energy approach for estimating vascular structure and deformation from B-mode ultrasound imagery

The estimation of local arterial structure and vascular deformation is hampered by regions of poor contrast and by the presence of ultrasound imaging artifacts such as speckle noise and specular reflections. Conventional methods for boundary extraction and velocity estimation can exhibit poor performance under these conditions. We demonstrate a new multi-stage processing scheme which uses a directionally sensitive variational energy segmentation to suppress noise and preserve image boundaries for robust extraction of the vessel contour. This contour information is used to generate a motion region-of-interest (mROI) for a modified optical flow scheme which estimates local boundary motion based only on image data lying within the mROI