Motion Estimation of Common Carotid Artery Wall Using a H ∞ Filter Based Block Matching Method

The movement of the common carotid artery (CCA) vessel wall has been well accepted as one important indicator of atherosclerosis, but it is still one challenge to estimate the motion of vessel wall from ultrasound images. In this paper, a robust H∞ filter was incorporated with block matching (BM) method to estimate the motion of carotid arterial wall. The performance of our method was compared with the standard BM method, Kalman filter, and manual traced method respectively on carotid artery ultrasound images from 50 subjects. Our results showed that the proposed method has a small estimation error (96 μm for the longitudinal motion and 46 μm for the radial motion), and good agreement (94.03% results fall within 95% confidence interval for the longitudinal motion and 95.53% for the radial motion) with the manual traced method. These results demonstrated the effectiveness of our method in the motion estimation of carotid wall in ultrasound images.