Ultrasound Common Carotid Artery Segmentation Based on Active Shape Model

Abstract

Carotid atherosclerosis is a major reason of stroke, a leading cause of death and disability. In this paper, a segmentation method based on Active Shape Model (ASM) is developed and evaluated to outline common carotid artery (CCA) for carotid atherosclerosis computer-aided evaluation and diagnosis. The proposed method is used to segment both media-adventitia-boundary (MAB) and lumen-intima-boundary (LIB) on transverse views slices from three-dimensional ultrasound (3D US) images. The data set consists of sixty-eight, 17 × 2 × 2, 3D US volume data acquired from the left and right carotid arteries of seventeen patients (eight treated with 80 mg atorvastatin and nine with placebo), who had carotid stenosis of 60% or more, at baseline and after three months of treatment. Manually outlined boundaries by expert are adopted as the ground truth for evaluation. For the MAB and LIB segmentations, respectively, the algorithm yielded Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC) of 94.4% ± 3.2% and 92.8% ± 3.3%, mean absolute distances (MAD) of 0.26 ± 0.18 mm and 0.33 ± 0.21 mm, and maximum absolute distances (MAXD) of 0.75 ± 0.46 mm and 0.84 ± 0.39 mm. It took 4.3 ± 0.5 mins to segment single 3D US images, while it took 11.7 ± 1.2 mins for manual segmentation. The method would promote the translation of carotid 3D US to clinical care for the monitoring of the atherosclerotic disease progression and regression.

Fully Automatic Extraction of Carotid Artery Contours from Ultrasound Images

“…Yang et al [10] proposed a method for common carotid artery segmentation based on the Active Shape Model. They reported that the method they used for their dataset yielded a DICE of 94.4% for the MA contours and 92.8% for the LI contours.…”

“…Several automatic or semi-automatic methods for detecting the contours of the carotid arteries from ultrasound images in the transversal view have been proposed [8]- [10]. Due to its robustness to noise and boundary gaps, the active contour model (ACM), which is also called "snakes," proposed by Kass et al [11], is being widely used for contour detection in medical images.…”

Two Automated Techniques for Carotid Lumen Diameter Measurement: Regional versus Boundary Approaches

“…However, we have found that some authors pointed out the need for automated measurement of carotid lumen diameter [47][48][49]. The lumen segmentation algorithms have been classified into regional-based vs. boundary-based: region-based [17,18], boundary-based [19][20][21][22]. Here, we describe each of these techniques and their limitations and discuss how they validated the measured parameters.…”

“…We have classified these techniques into three categories [10,15,16] as: region-based [17,18], boundary-based [19][20][21][22] or fusion-based [6].…”

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

“…They claimed that their method has achieved 100% accuracy in a group of 38 healthy subjects. Xin Yang et al [3] proposed to using Active Shape Model (ASM) to segment both media-adventitia-boundary (MAB) and lumen-intima-boundary (LIB) on transverse view slices from 3D ultrasound images. They used 340 two-dimensional CCA baseline contours in ASM offline training phase and another 340 two-dimensional CCA images in ASM online But it suffers from the fact that it needs a lot of time for training the model and it is very sensitive to the initial position.…”