A high-performance measurement method for artery intimamedia thickness in medical ultrasound images

Abstract:

A high-performance measurement method for the artery intima-media thickness (IMT) in medical ultrasound images is proposed. The scheme mainly consists of two parts. The first part is the detection process, including adaptive gray stretching for image enhancing, gradient transforming to restrain the over-segmentation, and the watershed algorithm for edge extraction. The intima can be detected automatically and exactly. The second part, combined with regional positioning and boundary fitting stages, is used to measure the IMT. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme can yield a good measurement result, and the calculation time can satisfy the practical requirement.