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.

scholarly journals Multiple Active Contours Guided by Differential Evolution for Medical Image Segmentation

2013 ◽  
Vol 2013 ◽  
pp. 1-14 ◽  
Author(s):  
I. Cruz-Aceves ◽  
J. G. Avina-Cervantes ◽  
J. M. Lopez-Hernandez ◽  
H. Rostro-Gonzalez ◽  
C. H. Garcia-Capulin ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Image Segmentation ◽  
Differential Evolution ◽  
Active Contour ◽  
Medical Image ◽  
Active Contours ◽  
Active Contour Model ◽  
Magnetic Resonance Images ◽  
Medical Image Segmentation ◽  
Segmentation Method ◽  
Contour Model

This paper presents a new image segmentation method based on multiple active contours guided by differential evolution, called MACDE. The segmentation method uses differential evolution over a polar coordinate system to increase the exploration and exploitation capabilities regarding the classical active contour model. To evaluate the performance of the proposed method, a set of synthetic images with complex objects, Gaussian noise, and deep concavities is introduced. Subsequently, MACDE is applied on datasets of sequential computed tomography and magnetic resonance images which contain the human heart and the human left ventricle, respectively. Finally, to obtain a quantitative and qualitative evaluation of the medical image segmentations compared to regions outlined by experts, a set of distance and similarity metrics has been adopted. According to the experimental results, MACDE outperforms the classical active contour model and the interactive Tseng method in terms of efficiency and robustness for obtaining the optimal control points and attains a high accuracy segmentation.

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 Medical Image Segmentation Based on a Hybrid Region-Based Active Contour Model

2014 ◽  
Vol 2014 ◽  
pp. 1-10 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tingting Liu ◽  
Haiyong Xu ◽  
Wei Jin ◽  
Zhen Liu ◽  
Yiming Zhao ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Level Set ◽  
Active Contour ◽  
Active Contours ◽  
Active Contour Model ◽  
Energy Functional ◽  
Medical Image Segmentation ◽  
Regularization Term ◽  
Contour Model ◽  
Proposed Model ◽  
Hybrid Region

A novel hybrid region-based active contour model is presented to segment medical images with intensity inhomogeneity. The energy functional for the proposed model consists of three weighted terms: global term, local term, and regularization term. The total energy is incorporated into a level set formulation with a level set regularization term, from which a curve evolution equation is derived for energy minimization. Experiments on some synthetic and real images demonstrate that our model is more efficient compared with the localizing region-based active contours (LRBAC) method, proposed by Lankton, and more robust compared with the Chan-Vese (C-V) active contour model.

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.

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