Computer-Assisted Venous Thrombosis Volume Quantification

Venous thrombosis (VT) volume assessment, by verifying its risk of progression when anticoagulant or thrombolytic therapies are prescribed, is often necessary to screen life-threatening complications. Commonly, VT volume estimation is done by manual delineation of few contours in the ultrasound (US)...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE journal of biomedical and health informatics 2009-03, Vol.13 (2), p.174-183
Main Authors: Puentes, J., Dhibi, M., Bressollette, L., Guias, B., Solaiman, B.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Algorithms
Anisotropic filters
Anisotropic magnetoresistance
Anisotropy
Deformable balloon
freehand ultrasound (US)
Humans
Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted - methods
Image Processing, Computer-Assisted - methods
Image sequences
Medical treatment
Noise robustness
Noise shaping
Phantoms, Imaging
robust anisotropic diffusion
Shape
Speckle
Thrombosis
Ultrasonic imaging
Ultrasonography
venous thrombosis (VT) volume
Venous Thrombosis - diagnostic imaging
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Summary:Venous thrombosis (VT) volume assessment, by verifying its risk of progression when anticoagulant or thrombolytic therapies are prescribed, is often necessary to screen life-threatening complications. Commonly, VT volume estimation is done by manual delineation of few contours in the ultrasound (US) image sequence, assuming that the VT has a regular shape and constant radius, thus producing significant errors. This paper presents and evaluates a comprehensive functional approach based on the combination of robust anisotropic diffusion and deformable contours to calculate VT volume in a more accurate manner when applied to freehand 2-D US image sequences. Robust anisotropic filtering reduces image speckle noise without generating incoherent edge discontinuities. Prior knowledge of the VT shape allows initializing the deformable contour, which is then guided by the noise-filtering outcome. Segmented contours are subsequently used to calculate VT volume. The proposed approach is integrated into a system prototype compatible with existing clinical US machines that additionally tracks the acquired images 3-D position and provides a dense Delaunay triangulation required for volume calculation. A predefined robust anisotropic diffusion and deformable contour parameter set enhances the system usability. Experimental results pertinence is assessed by comparison with manual and tetrahedron-based volume computations, using images acquired by two medical experts of eight plastic phantoms and eight in vitro VTs, whose independently measured volume is the reference ground truth. Results show a mean difference between 16 and 35 mm 3 for volumes that vary from 655 to 2826 mm 3 . Two in vivo VT volumes are also calculated to illustrate how this approach could be applied in clinical conditions when the real value is unknown. Comparative results for the two experts differ from 1.2% to 10.08% of the smallest estimated value when the image acquisition cadences are similar.
ISSN:1089-7771
2168-2194
1558-0032
2168-2208
DOI:10.1109/TITB.2008.2007592