scholarly journals Weighted area constraints-based breast lesion segmentation in ultrasound image analysis

2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
pp. 0
Author(s):  
Qianting Ma ◽  
Tieyong Zeng ◽  
Dexing Kong ◽  
Jianwei Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Level Set ◽  
Domain Knowledge ◽  
Ultrasound Image ◽  
Speckle Noise ◽  
Breast Ultrasound ◽  
Nonlinear Constraint ◽  
Low Contrast ◽  
Anisotropic Diffusion Filter ◽  
Initial Segmentation ◽  
Speed Up

<p style='text-indent:20px;'>Breast ultrasound segmentation is a challenging task in practice due to speckle noise, low contrast and blurry boundaries. Although numerous methods have been developed to solve this problem, most of them can not produce a satisfying result due to uncertainty of the segmented region without specialized domain knowledge. In this paper, we propose a novel breast ultrasound image segmentation method that incorporates weighted area constraints using level set representations. Specifically, we first use speckle reducing anisotropic diffusion filter to suppress speckle noise, and apply the Grabcut on them to provide an initial segmentation result. In order to refine the resulting image mask, we propose a weighted area constraints-based level set formulation (WACLSF) to extract a more accurate tumor boundary. The major contribution of this paper is the introduction of a simple nonlinear constraint for the regularization of probability scores from a classifier, which can speed up the motion of zero level set to move to a desired boundary. Comparisons with other state-of-the-art methods, such as FCN-AlexNet and U-Net, show the advantages of our proposed WACLSF-based strategy in terms of visual view and accuracy.</p>

Modified Distance Regularized Level Set Segmentation Based Analysis for Kidney Stone Detection

2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 24-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
K. Viswanath ◽  
R. Gunasundari
Keyword(s):  
Energy Level ◽  
Level Set ◽  
High Speed ◽  
Gabor Filter ◽  
Energy Levels ◽  
Speckle Noise ◽  
Ultrasound Images ◽  
Low Contrast ◽  
Level Set Function ◽  
Level Set Segmentation

The abnormalities of the kidney can be identified by ultrasound imaging. The kidney may have structural abnormalities like kidney swelling, change in its position and appearance. Kidney abnormality may also arise due to the formation of stones, cysts, cancerous cells, congenital anomalies, blockage of urine etc. For surgical operations it is very important to identify the exact and accurate location of stone in the kidney. The ultrasound images are of low contrast and contain speckle noise. This makes the detection of kidney abnormalities rather challenging task. Thus preprocessing of ultrasound images is carried out to remove speckle noise. In preprocessing, first image restoration is done to reduce speckle noise then it is applied to Gabor filter for smoothening. Next the resultant image is enhanced using histogram equalization. The preprocessed ultrasound image is segmented using distance regularized level set segmentation (DR-LSS), since it yields better results. It uses a two-step splitting methods to iteratively solve the DR-LSS equation, first step is iterating LSS equation, and then solving the Sign distance equation. The second step is to regularize the level set function which is the obtained from first step for better stability. The DR is included for LSS for eliminating of anti-leakages on image boundary. The DR-LSS does not require any expensive re-initialization and it is very high speed of operation. The RD-LSS results are compared with distance regularized level set evolution DRLSE1, DRLSE2 and DRLSE3. Extracted region of the kidney after segmentation is applied to Symlets (Sym12), Biorthogonal (bio3.7, bio3.9 & bio4.4) and Daubechies (Db12) lifting scheme wavelet subbands to extract energy levels. These energy level gives an indication about presence of stone in that particular location which significantly vary from that of normal energy level. These energy levels are trained by Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) and Back Propagation (BP) ANN to identify the type of stone with an accuracy of 98.6%.

Weighted Image Averaging Based Anisotropic Diffusion Denoising Method for Ultrasound Thyroid Image

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 380-390
Author(s):  
Haiyue Zhang ◽  
Daoyun Xu ◽  
Yongbin Qin
Keyword(s):  
Thyroid Disease ◽  
Anisotropic Diffusion ◽  
Averaging Method ◽  
Ultrasound Image ◽  
Speckle Noise ◽  
Denoising Method ◽  
Weighted Image ◽  
Diffusion Filter ◽  
Anisotropic Diffusion Filter ◽  
Image Averaging

Thyroid disease is a frequent occurrence in clinical practice and the computerized analysis of ultrasonography has been becoming the most prospective tool for thyroid disease automatic diagnosis. However, the accuracy of vision-based diagnostic analysis is often reduced because the quality of ultrasound image is easily corrupted by the speckle noise. Thus, noise suppression is imperative and significant for the thyroid ultrasonography image preprocessing to increase the reliability of subsequent analysis. In this paper, we propose a novel weighted image averaging method based on anisotropic diffusion filters combination to remove speckle noise and enhance the details of the image at the same time. The method first denoises the image separately by two filters with different performances. The speckle reducing anisotropic diffusion filter can enhance the details of the image, and the anisotropic diffusion filter can better suppress the speckle noise in the image. In order to integrate the advantages of the two filters and reduce the mutual interference meanwhile, an adaptive weighted image averaging method is further proposed to combine the pixels of the two denoised images. The experimental results indicate that the proposed method can achieve promising performance on the template images with various noise levels by considering PSNR and SSIM. What's more, it is not only superior to other methods in automatic segmentation, but also can obtain better visual effect for thyroid images.

scholarly journals Phase- and GVF-Based Level Set Segmentation of Ultrasonic Breast Tumors

2012 ◽  
Vol 2012 ◽  
pp. 1-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liang Gao ◽  
Xiaoyun Liu ◽  
Wufan Chen
Keyword(s):  
Level Set ◽  
Breast Tumor ◽  
Active Contour Model ◽  
Speckle Noise ◽  
Ultrasound Images ◽  
Low Contrast ◽  
Good Convergence ◽  
Capture Range ◽  
Edge Based ◽  
Concave Boundaries

Automatically extracting breast tumor boundaries in ultrasound images is a difficult task due to the speckle noise, the low image contrast, the variance in shapes, and the local changes of image intensity. In this paper, an improved edge-based active contour model in a variational level set formulation is proposed for semi-automatically capturing ultrasonic breast tumor boundaries. First, we apply the phase asymmetry approach to enhance the edges, and then we define a new edge stopping function, which can increase the robustness to the intensity inhomogeneities. To extend the capture range of the method and provide good convergence to boundary concavities, we use the phase information to obtain an improved edge map, which can be used to calculate the gradient vector flow (GVF). Combining the edge stopping term and the improved GVF in the level set framework, the proposed method can robustly cope with noise, and it can extract the low contrast and/or concave boundaries well. Experiments on breast ultrasound images show that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-art methods.

Breast Ultrasound Image Processing

2021 ◽  
pp. 44-69
Author(s):  
Strivathsav Ashwin Ramamoorthy ◽  
Varun P. Gopi
Keyword(s):  
Ultrasound Image ◽  
Breast Ultrasound ◽  
Ultrasound Images ◽  
Low Contrast ◽  
Cad Systems ◽  
Cad System ◽  
Ultrasound Image Processing ◽  
Serious Disease ◽  
Aided Diagnosis ◽  
Enhancement Algorithm

Breast cancer is a serious disease among women, and its early detection is very crucial for the treatment of cancer. To assist radiologists who manually delineate the tumour from the ultrasound image an automatic computerized method of detection called CAD (computer-aided diagnosis) is developed to provide valuable inputs for radiologists. The CAD systems is divided into many branches like pre-processing, segmentation, feature extraction, and classification. This chapter solely focuses on the first two branches of the CAD system the pre-processing and segmentation. Ultrasound images acquired depends on the operator expertise and is found to be of low contrast and fuzzy in nature. For the pre-processing branch, a contrast enhancement algorithm based on fuzzy logic is implemented which could help in the efficient delineation of the tumour from ultrasound image.

scholarly journals Fuzzy Based Adaptive Anisotropic Diffusion Despeckling Filter

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 2519-2522
Keyword(s):  
Anisotropic Diffusion ◽  
Multiplicative Noise ◽  
Ultrasound Image ◽  
Visual Quality ◽  
Speckle Noise ◽  
Structure And Function ◽  
Diffusion Filter ◽  
Anisotropic Diffusion Filter ◽  
And Function

Echocardiography is an ultrasound of the heart for the assessment of cardiac structure and function. Images obtained from the ultrasound suffer from a speckle Noise. Speckle is an inherent multiplicative noise which affects the visual perception by discriminating the fine details in the echocardiography. Speckle removal is important step to improve the visual quality of the echocardiography for better diagnosis. Anisotropic diffusion is one of the popular techniques to despeckle the ultrasound image in recent times. In this paper, we propose a fuzzy based adaptive anisotropic diffusion despeckling filter to despeckle echocardiography ultrasound image. The results show that fuzzy diffusion when combined with adaptive anisotropic diffusion filter gives better performance compared with existing despeckling filters

scholarly journals BGM-Net: Boundary-Guided Multiscale Network for Breast Lesion Segmentation in Ultrasound

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yunzhu Wu ◽  
Ruoxin Zhang ◽  
Lei Zhu ◽  
Weiming Wang ◽  
Shengwen Wang ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Breast Lesion ◽  
Speckle Noise ◽  
Breast Ultrasound ◽  
Ultrasound Images ◽  
Lesion Segmentation ◽  
Low Contrast ◽  
Feature Enhancement ◽  
Boundary Map ◽  
Weak Boundaries ◽  
Feature Pyramid

Automatic and accurate segmentation of breast lesion regions from ultrasonography is an essential step for ultrasound-guided diagnosis and treatment. However, developing a desirable segmentation method is very difficult due to strong imaging artifacts e.g., speckle noise, low contrast and intensity inhomogeneity, in breast ultrasound images. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a novel boundary-guided multiscale network (BGM-Net) to boost the performance of breast lesion segmentation from ultrasound images based on the feature pyramid network (FPN). First, we develop a boundary-guided feature enhancement (BGFE) module to enhance the feature map for each FPN layer by learning a boundary map of breast lesion regions. The BGFE module improves the boundary detection capability of the FPN framework so that weak boundaries in ambiguous regions can be correctly identified. Second, we design a multiscale scheme to leverage the information from different image scales in order to tackle ultrasound artifacts. Specifically, we downsample each testing image into a coarse counterpart, and both the testing image and its coarse counterpart are input into BGM-Net to predict a fine and a coarse segmentation maps, respectively. The segmentation result is then produced by fusing the fine and the coarse segmentation maps so that breast lesion regions are accurately segmented from ultrasound images and false detections are effectively removed attributing to boundary feature enhancement and multiscale image information. We validate the performance of the proposed approach on two challenging breast ultrasound datasets, and experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

scholarly journals Perbandingan Teknik Reduksi Derau Speckle Pada Citra Ultrasonograpi Payudara

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 27-36
Author(s):  
Yuli Triyani
Keyword(s):  
Breast Cancer ◽  
Ultrasound Image ◽  
Speckle Noise ◽  
Breast Ultrasound ◽  
Ultrasound Images ◽  
Reduction Techniques ◽  
Noise Filter ◽  
Incidence And Mortality ◽  
Structural Content ◽  
Aided Diagnosis

Breast cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer with the highest prevalence, incidence, and mortality rate for females in Indonesia and worldwide. Ultrasonography is a recommended modality for breast cancer, because it is comfortable, radiation free and it can be widely used. However, ultrasound images often occur in quality degradation caused by speckle noise that appears during image acquisition. It causes difficulty for radiologists or Computer Aided Diagnosis (CAD) systems to diagnose these images. Some techniques are proposed for reducing the speckle noise. This journal aims to compare the performance of 14 noise reduction techniques in breast ultrasound images. Quantitative testing was carried out on 58 breast ultrasound images and 3 artificial breast ultrasound image. The quantitative parameters are used include texture analysis (Mean, Variant, skewness, kurtosis, contrast and entropy) and evaluation of image quality (MSE, RMSE, SNR, SSIM, Structural content and Maximum Difference). The qualitative testing was also carried out with the assessment of 3 radiology specialists on 3 samples of each reduction technique. Based on test results, the 3 best performance filters are DsFsrad, DsFamedian dan DsFhmedian. Keywords: Ultrasound, speckle noise, filter

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