Improved Arterial Inner Wall Detection Using Generalized Median Computation

In this paper, we propose a novel method for automatic detection of the lumen diameter and intima-media thickness from dynamic B-mode sonographic image sequences with and without plaques. There are two phases in this algorithm. In the first phase a dual dynamic programming (DDP) is applied to detect the far wall IMT and near wall IMT. The general median curves are then calculated. In the second phase, the DDP is applied again using the median curves as the knowledge to obtain a more informed search and to potentially correct errors from the first phase. All results are visually controlled by professional physicians. Based on our experiments, this system can replace the experts’ manual work, which is time-consuming and not repeatable.