Carotid artery lumen segmentation in 3D free-hand ultrasound images using surface graph cuts.

We present a new approach for automated segmentation of the carotid lumen bifurcation from 3D free-hand ultrasound using a 3D surface graph cut method. The method requires only the manual selection of single seed points in the internal, external, and common carotid arteries. Subsequently, the centerline between these points is automatically traced, and the optimal lumen surface is found around the centerline using graph cuts. To refine the result, the latter process was iterated. The method was tested on twelve carotid arteries from six subjects including three patients with a moderate carotid artery stenosis. Our method successfully segmented the lumen in all cases. We obtained an average dice overlap with respect to a manual segmentation of 84% for healthy volunteers. For the patient data, we obtained a dice overlap of 66.7%.