Deep Venous Thrombosis: Database creation and image preprocessing

Abstract

Deep Venous Thrombosis (DVT) is a major national health problem. Its progression to a pulmonary embolism can lead to significant mortality. DVT is a frequent, severe and often under-recognized diagnosis for critically ill patient. Many factors can increase the risk of DVT: immobilization, cancer, age, surgery, previous DVT, hormone, thrombophilia, etc. Ultrasonography is mostly performed for its diagnosis because it is easy, immediate and non-invasive. In our project, the main goal is to determine the possible correlations between the blood clot structure and the DVT triggering factors. To characterize its structure, we decided to combine ultrasound and elastography imaging. The latter technique is already used to diagnose other diseases such as liver fibrosis and gives promising results to date animal blood clot. This paper explains how we create our database using Toshiba's system. Our data are screenshot images that have to be prepared for further processing such as texture characterization.