Common Carotid Artery Wall Localization In B-Mode Ultrasound Images

Abstract

Analysis of B-mode ultrasound images capturing the common carotid artery (CCA) provides significant indicators of the overall health of the cardiovascular system. In this paper we propose a novel method for automatic localization of the artery wall contour (approximated by circle) in utrasound images of the transverse section of the CCA. After detection of a region of interest (ROI) using a modified Viola-Jones detector we localize the best-fitting circle, which delimits the artery wall contour, by exhaustive search. Experimental results on a dataset of 145 ultrasound images show that the method outperforms a reference method based on the Hough transform and presents an excellent obustness against additive noise on different SNR levels.