SpLiNeS: Automatic analysis of ecographic movies in flow-mediateddilation

In this paper, we propose a fully automatic system for analyzing ecographic movies of flow-mediated dilation. Our approach uses a spline-based active contour (deformable template) to follow artery boundaries during the FMD procedure. A number of preprocessing steps (grayscale conversion, contrast enhancing, sharpening) are used to improve the visual quality of frames coming from the echographic acquisition. Our system can be used in real-time environments due to the high speed of edge recognition which iteratively minimizes fitting errors on endothelium boundaries. We also implemented a fully functional GUI which permits to interactively follow the whole recognition process as well as to reshape the results. The system accuracy and reproducibility has been validated with extensive in vivo experiments.