A semi-automatic method for carotid artery wall segmentation in MR images

The quantification of carotid artery stenosis via imaging techniques guides the physicians to take a decision regarding surgical interventions. The measurement of wall thickness from magnetic resonance (MR) images is a promising approach to measure the degree of carotid stenosis. Manual tracing of the carotid vessel walls is time consuming and is sensitive to observer variability. Further, the existing segmentation techniques are limited by the poor contrast and presence of noise in MR images. The objective this paper is to present a novel segmentation strategy for carotid lumen and outer wall from MR images. The segmentation has been carried out in two stages which starts with a user assisted region of interest selection. In the first stage, an active contour based global segmentation has been applied to classify the lumen region. In the second stage, morphological gradient of the region of interest has been computed. This is followed by particle swarm optimization based localized segmentation to separate the wall region. The results demonstrate excellent correspondence between the automatic and manual tracings for lumen and outer walls of the carotid artery.