The Research Of The Intima Media Thickness Measurement Based On Color Ultrasound

Along with the improvement of human being's living standard, broad attention has been concentrated on people's health problem. Nowadays cardio-cerebral vascular diseases have become increasingly common, while it is caused by diseases such as myocardial infarction, arteriosclerosis and so on, have become life-threatening diseases. However, with the development of modern medical technology, especially related to the development of diagnostic techniques, such as ultrasound imaging, X-ray imaging technology, CT technology for early detection of related symptoms that provides us a good protection. Ultrasound imaging is a popular technique for diagnosis of multiple diseases such as abdominal, obstetrical and cordis. It can provide detailed information for imaging organs and soft tissue structures in the human body. Unlike X-ray imaging, ultrasound imaging is noninvasive, portable, versatile, and does not produce any harmful radiations. Therefore, it is often preferred over other medical imaging modalities.The measurement of vascular intima-media thickness (IMT) is an important medical diagnostic technology, which is often used for diagnosis of cardiovascular diseases, which is denoted as the distance between the innermost boundaries of the intima and the adventitia of the artery.In this paper, we have proposed a new scheme for detection and measurement of the IMT in medical ultrasound images, in which the detection part includes adaptive gray stretching, gradient transforming, and watershed segmentation for extracting boundary of IMT flexibly and robustly, while the measurement part includes regional positioning and fitting to measure the results exactly. However, this method has certain advantages and calculation speed in dealing with the general vascular ultrasound images, but for some poor quality images, a more accurate extraction algorithm is needed.At the same time, the empirical mode decomposition (EMD) has been successfully used in one-dimensional signal processing. And scholars have it extended to two-dimensional signal processing with two-dimensional empirical mode decomposition (BEMD). In the paper, the two-dimensional empirical mode decomposition (BEMD) method is applied to medical images of carotid artery intima extraction, and the method achieved good results. This is also the first attempt in the IMT extraction with EMD theory.In the end, the two proposed IMT measurement algorithms were compared.