Localizing Region-Based Level-set Contouring for Common Carotid Artery in Ultrasonography

This work developed a fully-automated and efficient method for detecting contour of common carotid artery in the cross section view of two-dimensional B-mode sonography. First, we applied a preprocessing filter to the ultrasound image for the sake of reducing speckle. An adaptive initial contouring method was then performed to obtain the initial contour for level set segmentation. Finally, the localizing region-based level set segmentation automatically extract ed the precise contours of common carotid artery . The proposed method evaluate d 130 ultrasound images from three healthy volunteers and the segmentation results were compared to the boundaries outlined by an expert. Preliminary results show ed that the method described here could identify the contour of common carotid artery with satisfactory accuracy in this dataset.