Journal of information and communication convergence engineering

The Korea Institute of Information and Commucation Engineering (한국정보통신학회)
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Morphological Detection of Carotid Intima-Media Region for Fully Automated Thickness Measurement by Ultrasonogram

  • Park, Hyun Jun (Department of Computer Engineering, Pusan National University) ;
  • Kim, Kwang Baek (Division of Computer Software Engineering, Silla University)
  • Received : 2017.09.29
  • Accepted : 2017.12.04
  • Published : 2017.12.31
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Abstract

In this paper, we propose a method of detecting the region for measuring intima-media thickness (IMT). The existing methods for IMT measurement are automatic, but the region used for measuring IMT is not detected automatically but often set by the user. Therefore, research on detecting the intima-media region is needed for fully automated IMT measurement. The proposed method uses a morphological feature of the carotid artery visible as two long high-brightness horizontal lines at the upper and lower parts. It uses Gaussian blurring, ends-in search stretching, color quantization using a color-importance-based self-organizing map, and morphological operations to emphasize and to detect the morphological feature. The experimental results for evaluating the performance of the proposed method showed a 97.25% (106/109) success rate. Therefore, the proposed method can be used to develop a fully automated IMT measurement system.

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