In this paper, we propose a fully automatic method for extracting carotid artery contours from ultrasound images based on an active contour approach. Several contour extraction techniques have been proposed to measure carotid artery walls for early detection of atherosclerotic disease. However, the majority of these techniques require a certain degree of user interaction that demands time and effort. Our proposal automatically detects the position of the carotid artery by identifying blood flow information related to the carotid artery, and an active contour model is employed that uses initial contours placed in the detected position. Our method also applies a global energy minimization scheme to the active contour model. Experiments on clinical cases show that the proposed method automatically extracts the carotid artery contours at an accuracy close to that achieved by manual extraction.

We propose a fully automatic method for detecting the carotid artery from volumetric ultrasound images as a preprocessing stage for building three-dimensional images of the structure of the carotid artery. The proposed detector utilizes support vector machine classifiers to discriminate between carotid artery images and non-carotid artery images using two kinds of LBP-based features. The detector switches between these features depending on the anatomical position along the carotid artery. We evaluate our proposed method using actual clinical cases. Accuracies of detection are 100%, 87.5% and 68.8% for the common carotid artery, internal carotid artery, and external carotid artery sections, respectively.