Background. The segmentation of the common carotid artery (CCA) wall is imperative for the determination of the intima-media thickness (IMT) on B-mode ultrasound (US) images. The IMT is considered an important indicator in the evaluation of the risk for the development of atherosclerosis. In this paper, authors have discussed the relevance of measurements in clinical practices and the challenges that one has to face while approaching the segmentation of carotid artery on ultrasound images. The paper presents an overall review of commonly used methods for the CCA segmentation and IMT measurement along with the different performance metrics that have been proposed and used for performance validation. Summary and future directions are given in the conclusion.

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We present a fully automatic method for obtaining an initial estimate of endocardial border in short axis echo cardiographic videos at two different levels of left ventricle (LV). The geometry of the acoustic window along with circular Hough transform and image statistics is used to robustly identify the region of interest, which encloses left ventricle, irrespective of image quality and level of left ventricle at which image was acquired. Again in the region of interest, left ventricle center point (LVCP) was identified by image statistics. The approximate LV border was detected by radial gradient search with magnitude as well as direction and then smoothing it locally and temporally. The results were validated by comparing computer generated boundaries to those manually outlined by one expert on ten data sets each containing 28 frames over full cardiac cycle. The mean error in the boundaries was ±2mm. Directional radial gradient search along with temporal constraints from adjacent frames gives a better initial estimate of the LV boundary. The contour for each of the frame so obtained may serve a good initialization to optimize it by automated methods based on active contours.

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