Fast Vessel Segmentation and Tracking in Ultra High-Frequency Ultrasound Images
This enables intricate vessel-based measurements like intimal wall thickness and compliance for medical applications, representing an incremental improvement in domain-specific imaging.
The paper tackles the problem of segmenting and tracking deformable small and medium vessels in ultra high-frequency ultrasound images of the hand, achieving a fast and accurate system validated on 35 sequences and transferable to 5 more datasets.
Ultra High Frequency Ultrasound (UHFUS) enables the visualization of highly deformable small and medium vessels in the hand. Intricate vessel-based measurements, such as intimal wall thickness and vessel wall compliance, require sub-millimeter vessel tracking between B-scans. Our fast GPU-based approach combines the advantages of local phase analysis, a distance-regularized level set, and an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF), to rapidly segment and track the deforming vessel contour. We validated on 35 UHFUS sequences of vessels in the hand, and we show the transferability of the approach to 5 more diverse datasets acquired by a traditional High Frequency Ultrasound (HFUS) machine. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first algorithm capable of rapidly segmenting and tracking deformable vessel contours in 2D UHFUS images. It is also the fastest and most accurate system for 2D HFUS images.