4D vessel segmentation and tracking in Ultrasound

In this paper we describe a fast method to segment and track a vessel of interest in 4D (i.e. 3D + time) Ultrasound images. An initial 2D seed is used to initialize a single spatial Kalman-Filter tracker which tracks the vessel center-line in 3D. The 3D vessel is then segmented using a fast area weighted active contour method. This segmented 3D vessel is then tracked across multiple time-points using a set of temporal Kalman- Filters which track the movement of the center of the vessel in each 2D slice. The vessel boundaries are estimated by growing an area weighted active contour outward from the centerline. Based on qualitative as well as quantitative performance measures, the proposed method shows promising tracking results on numerous phantom as well as patient datasets.