Automatic distance measurement of abdominal aorta for ultrasonography-based visceral fat estimation.

Ultrasonography-based visceral fat estimation is a promising method to assess central obesity, which is associated with metabolic syndrome. The key to this method is to measure three types of distance in the ultrasound image. The most important one is the distance from the skin surface to the posterior wall of the abdominal aorta. We present a novel automatic measurement method to calculate this distance using 1D ultrasound signal processing. It is different from the conventional 2D image processing based methods which have high failure rate when the target is blurred or partially imaged. The proposed method identifies the waveforms of the aorta along a group of ultrasound scan lines and a rating mechanism is introduced to choose the best waveform for distance calculation. The robustness and accuracy of the method were evaluated by experiments based on clinical data.