Ali K. Hamou and Mahmoud R. El-Sakka, "A Novel Segmentation Technique for Carotid Ultrasound Images", IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, ICASSP'2004, Vol. 3, pp. 521 - 524, May 2004, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

Abstract

Ultrasound provides a non-invasive means for visualizing various tissues within the human body. However, these visualizations tend to be filled with speckle noise and other artifacts, due to the sporadic nature of sound waves. This paper presents a novel segmentation technique for use on noisy B-mode ultrasound images of the carotid artery. This scheme is based on histogram equalization, Canny edge detection and morphology methods. The proposed scheme provides various degrees of customizability, for a wide range of ultrasound images. The experimental results show that this scheme is accurate enough to segment the different textures in ultrasound images. These automatically segmented regions may alleviate the need for a practitioner's time consuming manual segmentation of wanted regions.