Patent Document ID: 20080051658
Application ID: 11845844
Patent Status: 0

Claim One:
1. An apparatus for automatic detection of lumen-intima and media-adventitia interfaces in a blood vessel comprising: acquisition means of a two-dimensional cross sectional representation of said blood vessel, said two-dimensional representation being obtained as a grey level image, in said image a region of interest (ROI) being defined that includes said lumen-intima interface and said media-adventitia interface of said vessel, said region of interest consisting of a grey level map f(n,m) of said representation, being n and m the coordinates of each pixel of said two-dimensional representation, characterized in that it comprises: means for executing, along a search path (i) (with i=1. .. N) in said region of interest and substantially orthogonal to the wall of said vessel, the following operations: detection of any discontinuity points by means of filtering said values f(n,m) along said path (i) and localization of said points, definition along said path of a first discontinuity point P 1 (i) having contrast greater or equal to a first reference value S 1 , and definition of a second discontinuity point P 2 (i) having contrast greater or equal to a second reference value S 2 , repeating the acquisition, filtering and definition operations for a number N of rectilinear search paths (i) in the above described region of interest (ROI): detection of said lumen-intima interface by means of interpolation of a set α of said points P 1 (i) of the different search paths (i), detection of said media-adventitia interface by means of interpolation of a set β of said points P 2 (i) of the different search paths (i).