Near-Infrared Forearm Vascular Width Calculation Using Radius Estimation of Tangent Circle

• Published in: Bioengineering (Basel) Vol. 11; no. 8; p. 801
• Main Authors: Ji, Qianru, Liu, Haoting, Tian, Zhen, Wang, Song, Li, Qing, Yi, Dewei
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Switzerland MDPI AG 07.08.2024; MDPI
• Subjects: Algorithms; Blood vessels; Circles (geometry); Coronary vessels; Edge detection; Error analysis; Forearm; geometric characteristics; Hemodialysis; I.R. radiation; Image contrast; Image enhancement; Image processing; Image segmentation; Infrared analysis; Infrared cameras; Infrared imagery; Kidney diseases; Medical imaging equipment; Methods; near-infrared image; Renal replacement therapy; skeleton extraction; Ultrasonic imaging; Uranus; vascular width; Venous access; Wavelet transforms; China; APSLSE image segmentation; geometric characteristics; skeleton extraction; image enhancement; near-infrared image; radius estimation of tangent circle (RETC); vascular width; edge detection
• ISSN: 2306-5354; 2306-5354
• DOI: 10.3390/bioengineering11080801

In response to the analysis of the functional status of forearm blood vessels, this paper fully considers the orientation of the vascular skeleton and the geometric characteristics of blood vessels and proposes a blood vessel width calculation algorithm based on the radius estimation of the tangent circle (RETC) in forearm near-infrared images. First, the initial infrared image obtained by the infrared camera is preprocessed by image cropping, contrast stretching, denoising, enhancement, and initial segmentation. Second, the Zhang-Suen refinement algorithm is used to extract the vascular skeleton. Third, the Canny edge detection method is used to perform vascular edge detection. Finally, a RETC algorithm is developed to calculate the vessel width. This paper evaluates the accuracy of the proposed RETC algorithm, and experimental results show that the mean absolute error between the vessel width obtained by our algorithm and the reference vessel width is as low as 0.36, with a variance of only 0.10, which can be significantly reduced compared to traditional calculation measurements.