Common carotid artery lumen segmentation in B-mode ultrasound transverse view images

To evaluate atherosclerosis, common carotid artery (CCA) lumen segmentation requires outlining the intima contour on transverse view of B-mode ultrasound images. The lumen contours are automatically segmented using a morphology method in this paper. The proposed method is based on self-adaptive histogram equalization, non-linear filtering, Canny edge detector and morphology methods. Experiments demonstrated that the merit (FOM) value of lumen segmentation is 0.705. The comparison between proposed method and manual contours on 180 transverse images of the CCA showed a mean absolute error of 0.47±0.13 mm and mean max distance of 2.08±0.63 mm respectively. These results compare favorably with a clinical need for reducing use variability.