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Extraction of Fine Blood Vessels from Ultrasound Images 超音波画像における細径血管抽出
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Ito, Masayasu Saito, Yuzuru Osawa, Yasuaki |
| Copyright Year | 2007 |
| Abstract | This paper is concerned with image processing for developing noninvasive ultrasound imaging system to display fine blood vessels. Ultrasound, X-rays, and light are mostly used for imaging blood vessels. Ultrasound finds its wide applications from examination to treatment. Here we discuss a method to detect fine blood vessels of several hundred microns to 2 millimeters in size and to display their shapes in a three dimensional way. It is not difficult to detect a large blood vessel in an ultrasound image, since the brightness or the echo level of the blood vessel can be differentiated easily from that of neighbor tissues. On the other hand, the small blood vessels show little difference in brightness from the neighbors. Besides, their contours are not clear due to speckle noise and thus preprocessing is essential to our purpose. Ultrasound images are accessed from the developed non-invasive imaging and diagnostic system for ultra fine blood vessels . It scans the region of 1[cm] ×1[cm] ×3[cm] using 30MHz transducer and 128 successive cross sectional images are obtained for processing. So far various smoothing and enhance methods have been proposed elsewhere. We examined an adaptive morphological operation in image processing and found that it can smooth and enhance the image at a time. We applied the useful filtering technique to the three dimensional ultrasound data. Speckle noise is reduced and the edges (counters) of blood vessels are enhanced in all cross sectional images. Furthermore, the contours can be enhanced by adding the edges detected in the divided sub-images. The detected edges may often include not only the edges of blood vessels but also edges from very weak echo areas and artifacts. These unnecessary edges are normally excluded by the decision rule that the cross sections of a blood vessel are each connected in space. Finally selected contours in all cross -----------------------------------------------------------ito@re.ccs.dendai.ac.jp sections are displayed to give a three dimensional shape and any three cross sections can be also displayed. |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://www.use-jp.org/USE2010/proceedings/USE07_proceedings/3-X/393.pdf |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
