Implicit active contours for N-dimensional biomedical image segmentation

Abstract

The segmentation of shapes from biomedical images has a wide range of uses such as image based modelling and bioimage analysis. In this paper, an active contour model is proposed for the segmentation of N-dimensional biomedical images. The proposed model uses a curvature smoothing flow and an image attraction force derived from the interactions between the geometries of the active contour model and the image objects. The active contour model is formulated using the level set method so as to handle topological changes automatically. The magnitude and orientation of the image attraction force is based on the relative geometric configurations between the active contour model and the image object boundaries. The vector force field is therefore dynamic, and the active contour model can propagate through narrow structures to segment complex shapes efficiently. The proposed model utilizes pixel interactions across the image domain, which gives a coherent representation of the image object shapes. This allows the active contour model to be robust to image noise and weak object edges. The proposed model is compared against widely used active contour models in the segmentation of anatomical shapes from biomedical images. It is shown that the proposed model has several advantages over existing techniques and can be used for the segmentation of biomedical images efficiently.