Atherosclerosis begins in childhood with the accumulation of lipid in the intima of arteries to form fatty streaks, advances through adult life when occlusive vascular disease may result in coronary heart disease, stroke and peripheral vascular disease. Non-invasive B-mode ultrasound has been found useful in studying risk factors in the symptom-free population. Large amount of data is acquired from continuous imaging of the vessels in a large study population. A high quality brachial vessel diameter measurement method is necessary such that accurate diameters can be measured consistently in all frames in a sequence, across different observers. Though human expert has the advantage over automated computer methods in recognizing noise during diameter measurement, manual measurement suffers from inter- and intra-observer variability. It is also time-consuming. An automated measurement method is presented in this paper which utilizes quality assurance approaches to adapt to specific image features, to recognize and minimize the noise effect. Experimental results showed the method's potential for clinical usage in the epidemiological studies.

Date Published: 3 July 1998
PDF: 11 pages
Proc. SPIE 3337, Medical Imaging 1998: Physiology and Function from Multidimensional Images, (3 July 1998); doi: 10.1117/12.312555

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 3337:
Medical Imaging 1998: Physiology and Function from Multidimensional Images
Eric A. Hoffman, Editor(s)