Active Contours for Measuring Arterial Wall Diameter of Astronauts from Ultrasound Images

Abstract

<p>The non-invasive assessment of cardiovascular changes with spaceflight<br />often involves the measurement of blood vessel dimension<br />using ultrasound imaging. However, many commonly used measurement<br />techniques are often manually intensive and dependent<br />on the individual making the measurements. We propose a new<br />automated method for measuring the vessel dimensions which involves<br />creating a smoothed edge map of the image and using active<br />contours to converge to the upper and lower vessel boundaries.<br />Preliminary results show that we are able to use this method<br />to detect vessels walls for vascular measurements from ultrasound<br />images.</p>