Intima Media Segmentation of the Carotid Artery

In this study we present a new automatic segmentation technique for detecting the intimamedia layer of the far wall of the common carotid artery in longitudinal ultrasound images, by applying snakes after image normalization and despeckling. We have tested and validated our segmentation technique on 100 images using the visual interpretation results and manual measurements by two vascular specialists. Results showed that no significant difference was found between the manual and the automatic segmentation measurements. Better segmentation results were obtained for the normalized despeckled images.