  Ultra High Frequency Ultrasound (UHFUS) enables the visualization of highly
deformable small and medium vessels in the hand. Intricate vessel-based
measurements, such as intimal wall thickness and vessel wall compliance,
require sub-millimeter vessel tracking between B-scans. Our fast GPU-based
approach combines the advantages of local phase analysis, a
distance-regularized level set, and an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF), to rapidly
segment and track the deforming vessel contour. We validated on 35 UHFUS
sequences of vessels in the hand, and we show the transferability of the
approach to 5 more diverse datasets acquired by a traditional High Frequency
Ultrasound (HFUS) machine. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first
algorithm capable of rapidly segmenting and tracking deformable vessel contours
in 2D UHFUS images. It is also the fastest and most accurate system for 2D HFUS
images.
