Active Countours for Measuring Arterial Wall Diameter of Astronauts from Ultrasound Images

The non-invasive assessment of cardiovascular changes with spaceflight often involves the measurement of blood vessel dimension using ultrasound imaging. However, many commonly used measurement techniques are often manually intensive and dependent on the individual making the measurements. We propose a new
automated method for measuring the vessel dimensions which involves creating a smoothed edge map of the image and using active contours to converge to the upper and lower vessel boundaries. Preliminary results show that we are able to use this method to detect vessels walls for vascular measurements from ultrasound images.