Adaptive Polar Active Contour for Segmentation and Tracking in Ultrasound Videos

Detection of relative changes in circulating blood volume is important to guide resuscitation and manage a variety of medical conditions, including sepsis, trauma, dialysis, and congestive heart failure. Recent studies have shown that estimates of circulating blood volume can be obtained from the cross-sectional area of the internal jugular vein (IJV) from ultrasound images. However, accurate segmentation and tracking of the IJV in ultrasound imaging is a challenging task and is significantly influenced by a number of parameters, such as the image quality, shape, and temporal variation. In this paper, we propose a novel adaptive polar active contour (Ad-PAC) algorithm for the segmentation and tracking of the IJV in ultrasound videos. In the proposed algorithm, the parameters of the Ad-PAC algorithm are adapted based on the results of segmentation in previous frames. The Ad-PAC algorithm is applied to 65 ultrasound videos captured from 13 healthy subjects, with each video containing 450 frames. The results show that spatial and temporal adaptation of the energy function significantly improves segmentation performance when compared with the current state-of-the-art active contour algorithms.