Joint detection of the carotid boundaries in longitudinal B-mode images

Abstract

This paper proposes a new approach for the automatic segmentation of the carotid adventitia in longitudinal B-scans, with and without the presence of plaque. The top and bottom adventitia contours are jointly detected with a 3D dynamic programing scheme that searches for the best pair of boundaries according to a specified fuzzy cost function. Some discriminating features of the adventitia in B-mode images are used to reduce the attraction by other edges. The final contours are filtered with a smoothing spline fitting. The proposed approach was quantitatively evaluated in a set of 38 images. In order to avoid high correlation of the results, a maximum of two images was selected from each patient. The carotid boundaries manually traced by a medical expert were used as the ground truth. Several statistics show that the proposed algorithm gives good results in most of the cases, including many poor quality images. Examples of the detected contours are presented and compared with the ground truth. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.