摘要:

Three-dimensional (3D) modelling of arteries using noninvasive ultrasound is a further development of this modality which currently displays images in a two-dimensional format. The approach aims to improve visualisation of the artery under consideration for later use in monitoring disease within it. The technique is based on analysing a series of transverse noninvasive ultra-sound scans. Other ultrasound techniques have used invasive scans, flow information and noninvasive longitudinal scans. The advantages of the new method concern noninvasive transverse scanning which allows a circle to be used as an appropriate model to determine the arterial wall data in each slice. This circle is extracted from the edge magnitude information provided by a version of the Canny edge-detection operator and is then located using an implementation of the Hough transform tailored to determine the contour which best fits the arterial data. The deviation from the circle provides the arterial wall template except where data is absent when the approximation itself is used. By extracting the template from successive ultrasound images in invivostudies 3D pictures of vessels, initially of the carotid artery and the bifurcation, have been developed. These were initially portrayed using oblique projection, but to improve visualisation more sophisticated voxel-based solid modelling has been used even though it incurs greater complexity and memory cost. The resulting images show that it is indeed possible to provide a realistic model via noninvasive transverse scanning by capitalising on modern techniques of feature extraction in images. The model's accuracy has been validated by a test object study and research is ongoing to include stenosis depiction.

DOI:10.1049/ip-i-2.1993.0012

出版商:IEE    

年代:1993

数据来源: IET