Active contours tool for the common carotid artery layers segmentation in ultrasound images

Among all cardiovascular diseases, atherosclerosis is considered as an alarm bell before other pathologies appear. Intima-Media Thickness (IMT) of the Common Carotid Artery (CCA) is widely used as an early and reliable indicator of atherosclerosis. Another element that affects cardiovascular risk estimation is the CCA diameter (CCAD). In clinical practice, these parameters are manually measured in ultrasound images to assess the cardiovascular risk in the corresponding patient. Ultrasound images present poor contrast and are quite affected by speckle noise, which introduces uncertainty in the manual measurement. This paper presents a fully-automatic approach based on active contours to segment the artery layers involved in the IMT and the CCA diameter in ultrasound images. The proposed method reduces the subjectivity of the measurement and gives as results mean IMT and CCAD along a certain artery length. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.