Carotid artery wall motion estimated from ultrasound imaging sequences using a nonlinear state space approach

Abstract

It is very challenge to investigate the motion of the carotid artery wall in ultrasound images,because of the high nonlinear dynamics of this motion. In our study,the nonlinear dynamics of carotid artery wall motion is first approximated by our nonlinear state-space approach driven by a mathematical model of the mechanical deformation of carotid artery wall. Then,the two-dimensional motion of carotid artery wall is computed by solving the nonlinear state-space approach using the unscented Kalman filter. We have then evaluated the performance of our approach by comparing it with the manual tracing method (the correlation coefficient equals 0.9897 for the radial motion and 0.9703 for the longitudinal motion) and three other state-of-the-art methods for 73 subjects. The results indicate the reliable applicability of our approach in tracking the motion of the carotid artery wall and its potential usefulness in routine clinical diagnosis.