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

Abstract

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