Real-Time Extraction of Carotid Artery Contours from Ultrasound Images

This paper presents the developement of a novel, fullyautomatic tracking and segmentation system to extract the boundary of the carotid artery from ultrasound images in real-time. The center of the carotid artery is tracked by using the Star algorithm [3]. The stability of the Star algorithm has been improved by using a temporal Kalman filter. A spatial Kalman filter is used to estimate the carotid artery boundary. The idea comes from the well-known problem of tracking a single target in a randomly distributed cluttered environment. Since the method does not employ any numerical optimization, convergence is very fast. The stability and accuracy of the method is demonstrated by tracking the carotid artery over a 30 second sequence of ultrasound images taken during a carotid artery examination.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2000
• Where: CBMS
• Authors: Purang Abolmaesumi, Mohammad Reza Sirouspour, S. E. Salcudean
• Keywords: Carotid Artery, Carotid Artery Boundary, CBMS 2000, Medical Imaging, Star Algorithm