Ultrasound Image Segmentation Techniques for Tracking and Measurement of the Internal Jugular Vein

Estimation of circulating blood volume is important for the management of acute and chronic diseases. Both excessive and insufficient fluid administration have been shown to result increased morbidity and mortality. Studies have shown that the circulating blood volume is correlated to the cross-sectional area (CSA) of the internal jugular vein (IJV) which can be estimated from its ultrasound images. In this paper, an efficient active contour-based algorithm is proposed for segmentation of the IJV. In the proposed algorithm, region growing is used to obtain an initial contour for each frame and then an active contour is used for its fine adjustments. The proposed algorithm was applied for segmentation and tracking of the cross-sectional area of the IJV in ultrasound videos with different image quality and different IJV shapes and quality and results of the validation experiments showed that the algorithm performs very accurately compared to expert manual segmentation, as considered as ground truth, and efficiently tracks the changes in the cross-sectional area of the IJV. The results from the proposed algorithm are also compared to current state of the art algorithms.