Ultrasound intima–media segmentation using Hough transform and dual snake model

Common carotid artery intima–media thickness (IMT), which is usually measured upon ultrasound images, is an important indicator to cardiovascular diseases. This paper proposes a snake model based segmentation method to automatically detect the boundary of intima–media for IMT measurement. In the proposed method, two contours are initialized from line segments generated by Hough transform and then evolved simultaneously by dual snake model for boundary detection. Experimental results show that the proposed method has strong robustness against ultrasound artifacts, gives better results than traditional snake model and dynamic programming based methods, and achieves similar clinical parameters to ground truth data.