Border detection of common carotid artery using hough transform

The arteriosclerosis is on the increase with an aging or change of our living environment. For that reason, diagnosis of the common carotid artery using echocardiogram is doing to take precautions carebropathy. The arteriosclerosis of the common carotid artery is diagnosed using Intima-Media Thickness (IMT) which is obtained from echocardiogram. In order to measure IMT from echocardiogram, it is required to detect a border which is a boundary between vessel tissue layers. The method of border detection requires reproducibility and high accuracy. The conventional methods to detect the border curve depend on differential value of brightness on the common carotid artery. Therefore, we can't extract a good candidate point by influence of a noise. In this paper, we propose the high-accuracy detection method by Hough Transform. About high-accuracy, it realized by attaching importance to high reliable candidate point of border. © 2009 The Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan.