Despeckle and Segmentation of Carotid Artery for Measurement of Intima-media Thickness

B-mode ultrasound images of carotid artery are used to measure the intima-media thickness (IMT), which detects the probabilities of atherosclerosis and cardiovascular diseases. Ultrasound images suffer from peculiar phenomena which creates speckle (a type of noise) on the image. The speckles present in the medical images detoriates the quality of the image. Thus the paper presents a method of removing these speckles by using local statistics mean variance (lsmv) filter. It is a preprocessing step of medical image processing. Conventional IMT was done by locating the far walls of the carotid artery. This can be changed by applying segmentation algorithm which could automatically detect the far walls and could measure the IMT. This paper approaches towards automatic edge detection method using prewitt operator. The performance analysis of the proposed method is done in case despeckling as well as segmentation method. The performance parameters show that the proposed method performs better and at the same time reduces the manual effort.