A New Contour Initialization of CT Image Sequences in GVF Model

Abstract

In order to overcome the shortcomings that GVF model is susceptible to structures with slender topology, an improved watershed algorithm is proposed to determine initial contour of GVF Snake model. The organs in medical CT images often were irregular and had deep boundary concavities, and CT serial images were up to hundreds pieces. Firstly, in a CT image the improved watershed algorithm grows an organ from a seed block by the principle of the similarity between gray scale and texture, then using its edge as the start contour of the adjacent CT sequence, with GVF algorithm segment the organ from a sequence of images, the process is repeated until get all slices of the entire abdomen. Experiment results which are the basic of 3-D reconstruction and cancer detection show that the new contour initialization algorithm can obtain segmentation result efficiently, accurately and cost less time.