Developing an automatic brachial artery segmentation and bloodstream analysis tool using possibilistic C-means clustering from color doppler ultrasound images

Abstract

Automatic segmentation of brachial artery and blood-flow dynamics are important for early detection of cardiovascular disease and other vascular endothelial malfunctions. In this paper, we propose a software that is noise tolerant and fully automatic in segmentation of brachial artery from color Doppler ultrasound images. Possibilistic C-Means clustering algorithm is applied to make the automatic segmentation. We use HSV color model to enhance the contrast of bloodstream area in the input image. Our software also provides index of hemoglobin distribution with respect to the blood flow velocity for pathologists to proceed further analysis. In experiment, the proposed method successfully extracts the target area in 59 out of 60 cases (98.3%) with field expert’s verification.