DefinePK

Abstract

Nowadays, ultrasound image is important and very useful in medical field. It is a technique used for visualizing body structures including tendons, muscles, joints, vessels and internal organs. For the atherosclerosis diagnosis, ultrasound imaging is commonly used because of the noninvasively assessment in monitoring condition inside the carotid artery. In certain conditions, the acquired images may be unclear caused by speckle noise and other factors. Thus, may affect the accuracy of artery wall detection. This study proposes an edge detection method that could detect edges in carotid artery images accurately without including noise or fine details by using the combination of the Bilateral Filter, Otsu Threshold and Gabor Filter. The Bilateral Filter is used to suppress the noise level in the input image. Otsu Threshold used to segment the regions into background and objects. The Gabor Filter is applied to detect edge accurately without including noise or fine details. From our simulation, the proposed method is capable of producing sharp edgemap image with less noise and detects edges accurately in comparison to conventional edge detection methods for different carotid artery ultrasound images.