Blood Vessel Diameter Estimation System Using Active Contours

Abstract

The study and analysis of blood vessel geometry has become the basis of medical applications related to early diagnosis and effective monitoring of therapies in vascular diseases. This paper presents a new method to trace the outline of blood vessels from imperfect images and extract useful information about their dimensions in an automated manner.The system consists of a segmentation procedure that uses two Active Contours to detect blood vessel boundaries and a novel approach to measure blood vessel diameters directly as the distance between two points. We have succeeded in designing and implementing an automated, robust, measurement method that is not only accurate (it takes away human error) but also user-friendly and requires very little image pre-processing. The system is tested with a set of grey scale images of blood vessels.Results of all the aspects of the design and implementation are presented along with graphs and images.