An Improved Approach for Accurate and Efficient Measurement of Common Carotid Artery Intima-Media Thickness in Ultrasound Images

The intima-media thickness (IMT) of common carotid artery (CCA) can serve as an important indicator for the assessment of cardiovascular diseases (CVDs). In this paper an improved approach for automatic IMT measurement with low complexity and high accuracy is presented. 100 ultrasound images from 100 patients were tested with the proposed approach. The ground truth (GT) of the IMT was manually measured for six times and averaged, while the automatic segmented (AS) IMT was computed by the algorithm proposed in this paper. The mean difference ± standard deviation between AS and GT IMT is 0.0231 ± 0.0348 mm, and the correlation coefficient between them is 0.9629. The computational time is 0.3223 s per image with MATLAB under Windows XP on an Intel Core 2 Duo CPU E7500 @2.93 GHz. The proposed algorithm has the potential to achieve real-time measurement under Visual Studio.