Active Contours for Measuring Arterial Wall Diameter of Astronauts from Ultrasound Images

The non-invasive assessment of cardiovascular changes with spaceflightoften involves the measurement of blood vessel dimensionusing ultrasound imaging. However, many commonly used measurementtechniques are often manually intensive and dependenton the individual making the measurements. We propose a newautomated method for measuring the vessel dimensions which involvescreating a smoothed edge map of the image and using activecontours to converge to the upper and lower vessel boundaries.Preliminary results show that we are able to use this methodto detect vessels walls for vascular measurements from ultrasoundimages