Detections of arterial wall in sonographic artery images using dual dynamic programming.

We propose a novel dual dynamic programming (DDP) technique for detecting intimal and adventitial layers of the common carotid artery of the B-mode sonographic images. This method embeds the anatomic knowledge into its structure so that the robustness against the speckles is increased. Moreover, it inherits the property of getting the optimal solution as the traditional dynamic programming (TDP). Our experimental study shows that the DDP technique achieves a detection performance comparable to manual tracing achieved by physicians. The results demonstrate that it has the potential to perform qualitatively better than applying TDP twice in intimal and adventitial layer detection on sonographic B-mode images.