Fully Automated Common Carotid Artery and Internal Jugular Vein Identification and Tracking Using B-Mode Ultrasound

We describe a fully automated ultrasound analysis system that tracks and identifies the common carotid artery (CCA) and the internal jugular vein (IJV). Our goal is to prevent inadvertent damage to the CCA when targeting the IJV for catheterization. The automated system starts by identifying and fitting ellipses to all the regions that look like major arteries or veins throughout each B-mode ultrasound image frame. The spokes ellipse algorithm described in this paper tracks these putative vessels and calculates their characteristics, which are then weighted and summed to identify the vessels. The optimum subset of characteristics and their weights were determined from a training set of 38 subjects, whose necks were scanned with a portable 10 MHz ultrasound system at 10 frames per second. Stepwise linear discriminant analysis (LDA) narrowed the characteristics to the five that best distinguish between the CCA and IJV. A paired version of Fisher's LDA was used to calculate the weights for each of the five parameters. Leave-one-out validation studies showed that the system could track and identify the CCA and IJV with 100% accuracy in this dataset.

[1]  R. Klatzky,et al.  Peripherally Inserted Central Catheter Placement With the Sonic Flashlight , 2009, Journal of ultrasound in medicine : official journal of the American Institute of Ultrasound in Medicine.

[2]  Andrew W. Fitzgibbon,et al.  Ellipse-specific direct least-square fitting , 1996, Proceedings of 3rd IEEE International Conference on Image Processing.

[3]  M J Davies,et al.  Pulmonary Artery Catheterisation. An Assessment of Risks and Benefits in 220 Surgical Patients , 1982, Anaesthesia and intensive care.

[4]  P. Couture,et al.  Carotid artery-internal jugular fistula: another complication following pulmonary artery catheterization via the internal jugular venous route. , 1994, Anesthesiology.

[5]  M. Mathru,et al.  Acute complications of pulmonary artery catheter insertion in critically ill patients. , 1986 .

[6]  P. S. Reddy,et al.  Ultrasound‐Assisted Cannulation of the Internal Jugular Vein A Prospective Comparison to the External Landmark‐Guided Technique , 1993, Circulation.

[7]  Christopher A. Troianos,et al.  Internal Jugular Vein and Carotid Artery Anatomic Relation as Determined by Ultrasonography , 1996, Anesthesiology.

[8]  M. Giger,et al.  Computerized lesion detection on breast ultrasound. , 2002, Medical physics.

[9]  M. Lamy,et al.  High‐dose Aprotinin Reduces Blood Loss in Patients Undergoing Total Hip Replacement Surgery , 1994, Anesthesiology.

[10]  A Fenster,et al.  Prostate boundary segmentation from 2D ultrasound images. , 2000, Medical physics.

[11]  A Fenster,et al.  An algorithm for automatic needle localization in ultrasound-guided breast biopsies. , 2000, Medical physics.

[12]  J S Kua,et al.  Airway obstruction following internal jugular vein cannulation , 1997, Anaesthesia.

[13]  Benoit M. Dawant,et al.  Morphometric analysis of white matter lesions in MR images: method and validation , 1994, IEEE Trans. Medical Imaging.

[14]  Septimiu E. Salcudean,et al.  Real-Time Vessel Segmentation and Tracking for Ultrasound Imaging Applications , 2007, IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging.

[15]  D. Poxton,et al.  Detecting Asymmetries in Hippocampal Shape and Receptor Distribution using Statistical Appearance Models and Linear Discriminant Analysis , 1998, BMVC.

[16]  G. Stetten,et al.  Overlaying ultrasonographic images on direct vision. , 2001, Journal of ultrasound in medicine : official journal of the American Institute of Ultrasound in Medicine.

[17]  J. Alison Noble,et al.  Ultrasound image segmentation: a survey , 2006, IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging.

[18]  Hanif M. Ladak,et al.  Prostate segmentation from 2D ultrasound images , 2000, Proceedings of the 22nd Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (Cat. No.00CH37143).

[19]  A Fenster,et al.  Segmentation of carotid artery in ultrasound images: method development and evaluation technique. , 2000, Medical physics.

[20]  T. Hatanaka,et al.  Vertebral artery pseudoaneurysm: a rare complication of internal jugular vein catheterization. , 1992, Anesthesia and analgesia.

[21]  H K King,et al.  Postthyroidectomy laryngoscopic examination. , 1994, Anesthesiology.

[22]  I Kronzon,et al.  Transesophageal echocardiographic identification of a retrograde dissection of the ascending aorta caused by inadvertent cannulation of the common carotid artery. , 1997, Journal of the American Society of Echocardiography : official publication of the American Society of Echocardiography.

[23]  N A Zaidi,et al.  Cerebral infarct following central venous cannulation , 1998, Anaesthesia.

[24]  George D. Stetten,et al.  Carotid Artery and Jugular Vein Tracking and Differentiation Using Spatiotemporal Analysis , 2006, MICCAI.