ACTIVE CONTOUR BASED ON 3D STRUCTURE TENSOR APPLIED IN MEDICAL IMAGE SEGMENTATION

2013 ◽  
Vol 06 (04) ◽  
pp. 1350021
Author(s):  
PING ZHANG ◽  
ZHAOHUA CUI ◽  
HALE XUE ◽  
DEXUAN ZOU ◽  
LI GUO
Keyword(s):  
Image Segmentation ◽  
Level Set ◽  
Energy Function ◽  
Active Contour ◽  
Medical Image ◽  
Medical Image Segmentation ◽  
Structure Tensor ◽  
Image Feature ◽  
Intensity Inhomogeneity ◽  
Initial Contour

The paper presents an improved tensor-based active contour model in a variational level set formulation for medical image segmentation. In it, a new energy function is defined with a local intensity fitting term in intensity inhomogeneity of the image, and with a global intensity fitting term in intensity homogeneity domain. Weighting factor is chosen to balance these two intensity fitting terms, which can be calculated automatically by local entropy. The level set regularization term is to replace contour curve to find the minimum of the energy function. Particularly, structure tensor is applied to describe the image, which overcomes the disadvantage of image feature without structure information. The experimental results show that our proposed method can segment image efficiently whether it presents intensity inhomogeneity or not and wherever the initial contour is. Moreover, compared with the Chan–Vese model and local binary fitting model, our proposed model not only handles better intensity inhomogeneity, but also is less sensitive to the location of initial contour.

scholarly journals New Region-Scalable Discriminant and Fitting Energy Functional for Driving Geometric Active Contours in Medical Image Segmentation

2014 ◽  
Vol 2014 ◽  
pp. 1-13 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xuchu Wang ◽  
Yanmin Niu ◽  
Liwen Tan ◽  
Shao-Xiang Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Image Segmentation ◽  
Level Set ◽  
Active Contour ◽  
Medical Image ◽  
Active Contours ◽  
Active Contour Model ◽  
Energy Functional ◽  
Medical Image Segmentation ◽  
Intensity Inhomogeneity ◽  
Boundary Problems

We propose a novel region-based geometric active contour model that uses region-scalable discriminant and fitting energy functional for handling the intensity inhomogeneity and weak boundary problems in medical image segmentation. The region-scalable discriminant and fitting energy functional is defined to capture the image intensity characteristics in local and global regions for driving the evolution of active contour. The discriminant term in the model aims at separating background and foreground in scalable regions while the fitting term tends to fit the intensity in these regions. This model is then transformed into a variational level set formulation with a level set regularization term for accurate computation. The new model utilizes intensity information in the local and global regions as much as possible; so it not only handles better intensity inhomogeneity, but also allows more robustness to noise and more flexible initialization in comparison to the original global region and regional-scalable based models. Experimental results for synthetic and real medical image segmentation show the advantages of the proposed method in terms of accuracy and robustness.

Automatic segmentation of medical images using a novel Harris Hawk optimization method and an active contour model

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Maria Tamoor ◽  
Irfan Younas
Keyword(s):  
Image Segmentation ◽  
Active Contour ◽  
Medical Image ◽  
Active Contour Model ◽  
Heart Diseases ◽  
Medical Image Segmentation ◽  
Gaussian Kernel ◽  
Initial Contour ◽  
Automated Method ◽  
Contour Model

Medical image segmentation is a key step to assist diagnosis of several diseases, and accuracy of a segmentation method is important for further treatments of different diseases. Different medical imaging modalities have different challenges such as intensity inhomogeneity, noise, low contrast, and ill-defined boundaries, which make automated segmentation a difficult task. To handle these issues, we propose a new fully automated method for medical image segmentation, which utilizes the advantages of thresholding and an active contour model. In this study, a Harris Hawks optimizer is applied to determine the optimal thresholding value, which is used to obtain the initial contour for segmentation. The obtained contour is further refined by using a spatially varying Gaussian kernel in the active contour model. The proposed method is then validated using a standard skin dataset (ISBI 2016), which consists of variable-sized lesions and different challenging artifacts, and a standard cardiac magnetic resonance dataset (ACDC, MICCAI 2017) with a wide spectrum of normal hearts, congenital heart diseases, and cardiac dysfunction. Experimental results show that the proposed method can effectively segment the region of interest and produce superior segmentation results for skin (overall Dice Score 0.90) and cardiac dataset (overall Dice Score 0.93), as compared to other state-of-the-art algorithms.

Composite fuzzy-wavelet-based active contour for medical image segmentation

2020 ◽  
Vol 37 (9) ◽  
pp. 3525-3541
Author(s):  
Hiren Mewada ◽  
Amit V. Patel ◽  
Jitendra Chaudhari ◽  
Keyur Mahant ◽  
Alpesh Vala
Keyword(s):  
Image Segmentation ◽  
Level Set ◽  
Legendre Polynomial ◽  
Active Contour ◽  
Medical Image ◽  
Medical Images ◽  
Medical Image Segmentation ◽  
Low Resolution ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Proposed Model

Purpose In clinical analysis, medical image segmentation is an important step to study the anatomical structure. This helps to diagnose and classify abnormality in the image. The wide variations in the image modality and limitations in the acquisition process of instruments make this segmentation challenging. This paper aims to propose a semi-automatic model to tackle these challenges and to segment medical images. Design/methodology/approach The authors propose Legendre polynomial-based active contour to segment region of interest (ROI) from the noisy, low-resolution and inhomogeneous medical images using the soft computing and multi-resolution framework. In the first phase, initial segmentation (i.e. prior clustering) is obtained from low-resolution medical images using fuzzy C-mean (FCM) clustering and noise is suppressed using wavelet energy-based multi-resolution approach. In the second phase, resultant segmentation is obtained using the Legendre polynomial-based level set approach. Findings The proposed model is tested on different medical images such as x-ray images for brain tumor identification, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), spine images, blood cells and blood vessels. The rigorous analysis of the model is carried out by calculating the improvement against noise, required processing time and accuracy of the segmentation. The comparative analysis concludes that the proposed model withstands the noise and succeeds to segment any type of medical modality achieving an average accuracy of 99.57%. Originality/value The proposed design is an improvement to the Legendre level set (L2S) model. The integration of FCM and wavelet transform in L2S makes model insensitive to noise and intensity inhomogeneity and hence it succeeds to segment ROI from a wide variety of medical images even for the images where L2S failed to segment them.

scholarly journals A New Kernel-Based Fuzzy Level Set Method for Automated Segmentation of Medical Images in the Presence of Intensity Inhomogeneity

2014 ◽  
Vol 2014 ◽  
pp. 1-14 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maryam Rastgarpour ◽  
Jamshid Shanbehzadeh
Keyword(s):  
Image Segmentation ◽  
Level Set ◽  
Medical Image ◽  
Medical Images ◽  
Medical Image Segmentation ◽  
Gaussian Kernel ◽  
Intensity Inhomogeneity ◽  
Integrative Approach ◽  
Robust Segmentation ◽  
Level Set Evolution

Researchers recently apply an integrative approach to automate medical image segmentation for benefiting available methods and eliminating their disadvantages. Intensity inhomogeneity is a challenging and open problem in this area, which has received less attention by this approach. It has considerable effects on segmentation accuracy. This paper proposes a new kernel-based fuzzy level set algorithm by an integrative approach to deal with this problem. It can directly evolve from the initial level set obtained by Gaussian Kernel-Based FuzzyC-Means (GKFCM). The controlling parameters of level set evolution are also estimated from the results of GKFCM. Moreover the proposed algorithm is enhanced with locally regularized evolution based on an image model that describes the composition of real-world images, in which intensity inhomogeneity is assumed as a component of an image. Such improvements make level set manipulation easier and lead to more robust segmentation in intensity inhomogeneity. The proposed algorithm has valuable benefits including automation, invariant of intensity inhomogeneity, and high accuracy. Performance evaluation of the proposed algorithm was carried on medical images from different modalities. The results confirm its effectiveness for medical image segmentation.

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