Article ID | Journal | Published Year | Pages | File Type |
---|---|---|---|---|
10692410 | Ultrasound in Medicine & Biology | 2005 | 18 Pages |
Abstract
Segmentation of multiple objects with irregular contours and surrounding sporadic spots is a common practice in ultrasound image analysis. A new region-based approach, called cell-competition algorithm, is proposed for simultaneous segmentation of multiple objects in a sonogram. The algorithm is composed of two essential ideas. One is simultaneous cell-based deformation of regions and the other is cell competition. The cells are generated by two-pass watershed transformations. The cell-competition algorithm has been validated with 13 synthetic images of different contrast-to-noise ratios and 71 breast sonograms. Three assessments have been carried out and the results show that the boundaries derived by the cell-competition algorithm are reasonably comparable to those delineated manually. Moreover, the cell-competition algorithm is robust to the variation of regions-of-interest and a range of thresholds required for the second-pass watershed transformation. The proposed algorithm is also shown to be superior to the region-competition algorithm for both types of images. (E-mail: chung@ntu.edu.tw)
Keywords
Related Topics
Physical Sciences and Engineering
Physics and Astronomy
Acoustics and Ultrasonics
Authors
Chung-Ming Chen, Yi-Hong Chou, Curtis S.K. Chen, Jie-Zhi Cheng, Yen-Fu Ou, Fang-Cheng Yeh, Kuei-Wu Chen,