An effective segmentation method of ultrasonic thyroid nodules
Wenpeng Du, Nong Sang · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2015
Segmentation of ultrasound image is an important port of ultrasound medical computer-aided system. However, due to the speckle noise, intensity heterogeneity, and low contrast, the ultrasonic segmentation is much difficult. In this paper, we introduce an effective method which integrates edge phase information and an effective active contour model to make the segmentation better. First, we use the speckle reducing anisotropic diffusion method to suppress the noise in ultrasound images. Then, we utilize the local phase information from monogenic signal to form a novel edge indicator and we use the indicator to replace the traditional intensity-based speed stopping term in distance regularized level set evolution. Another contribution of this paper is that we extend the proposed method to the field of ultrasonic thyroid nodules segmentation, qualitative and quantitative comparative results demonstrate the outperformance of our approach.