Common Carotid Artery Wall Localization in B-mode Ultrasound Images for Initialization of Artery Wall Tracking Methods

Analysis of the movement of the common carotid artery (CCA) wall in ultrasound sequences can be used for diagnosis of many cardiovascular diseases. In this paper we introduce a method for localization of the CCA wall contour (approximated by a circle) inside an ultrasound image, which can be used in real-time applications for initialization of an artery wall tracking method. First we detect a rectangular region of interest (ROI) using a recently proposed method based on the Viola-Jones detector. Next we perform an exhaustive search over all possible circles inside the ROI. Circle which maximizes a particular criterion represents the final estimate. Experimental results on a dataset of 145 ultrasound images show that the method outperforms a reference method based on the Hough transform in terms of precision and misdetection rates.