Carotid Artery Lumen Segmentation in 3D Free-Hand Ultrasound Images Using Surface Graph Cuts

Andrés M. Arias Lorza¹, Diego D.B. Carvalho¹, Jens Petersen², Anouk C. van Dijk³, Aad van der Lugt³, Wiro J. Niessen^{1, 4}, Stefan Klein¹, and Marleen de Bruijne^{1, 2}

¹Departments of Radiology and Medical Informatics, Erasmus MC, The Netherlands

²Department of Computer Science, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

³Department of Radiology, Erasmus MC, The Netherlands

⁴Faculty of Applied Sciences, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands

Abstract. We present a new approach for automated segmentation of the carotid lumen bifurcation from 3D free-hand ultrasound using a 3D surface graph cut method. The method requires only the manual selection of single seed points in the internal, external, and common carotid arteries. Subsequently, the centerline between these points is automatically traced, and the optimal lumen surface is found around the centerline using graph cuts. To refine the result, the latter process was iterated. The method was tested on twelve carotid arteries from six subjects including three patients with a moderate carotid artery stenosis. Our method successfully segmented the lumen in all cases. We obtained an average dice overlap with respect to a manual segmentation of 84% for healthy volunteers. For the patient data, we obtained a dice overlap of 66.7%.

LNCS 8150, p. 542 ff.

Full article in PDF | BibTeX

lncs@springer.com
© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013