Abstract—One of the most common cause of emergency surgery of the abdomen is acute appendicitis. Early and accurate diagnosis of appendicitis can decrease the morbidity and hospital cost by reducing the delay in diagnosis of appendicitis and its associated complications. In current clinical practice, the measurement of the outer appendiceal diameter by sonographers has been used as one of the indication to confirm acute appendicitis, where the value greater than 6 mm is considered to be a sign of acute appendicitis. However, since ultrasound image itself is in low quality due to speckle noise, error in manual measurement by the sonographers might occur due to wrong detection of the appendiceal edge or wrong placement of the calliper. Thus, we propose certain image processing techniques to enhance the image quality to help sonographers in performing a better diagnosis. This paper proposed a series of image processing method including image enhancement, image segmentation and edge detection before measuring the appendiceal. Selection of image enhancement method is made based on MSE and PSNR values while selection of image segmentation method is made based on the segmented image and execution time. Ten trials of measurement by sonographers using ultrasound and measurement after image processing were gathered. Statistical analyses of both measurements were computed. Mean and standard deviation for the sonographers measurements and measurements after image processing are 4.937±0.14mm and 4.613710±0.08mm respectively. Sonographers measurement showed higher variability compared to measurement after image processing thus measuring the appendiceal diameter after image processing can be helpful for a better diagnosis.

Index Terms—Acute appendicitis, appendix ultrasound, edge detection, image enhancement, image segmentation

Jostinah lam, Heamn N. Abduljabbar, and Eko Supriyanto are with Diagnostics Research Group, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, 81310 Skudai Johor (e-mail: jostinah.lam@gmail.com; heamn_jabbari@yahoo.com; eko@utm.my).
Christina Pahl is with Diagnostics Research Group, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, 81310 Skudai Johor and Ilmenau University of Technology in Germany (e- mail: pahl.christina@gmail.com).

 

Cite: J. Lam, C. Pahl, H. N. Abduljabbar, and E. Supriyanto, "Measurement and Analysis of the Diameter of Appendix Based on Ultrasound Images," International Journal of Bioscience, Biochemistry and Bioinformatics vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 130-136, 2014.