Abstract
Image segmentation is one of the earliest and most important stages of image processing and plays an important role in both qualitative and quantitative analysis of medical ultrasound images but ultrasound images have low level of contrast and are corrupted with strong speckle noise. Due to these effects, segmentation of ultrasound images is very challenging and traditional image segmentation methods may not be leads to satisfactory results. The active contour method has been one of the widely used techniques for image segmentation; however, due to low quality of ultrasound images, it has encountered difficulties. In this paper, we presented a segmental method combined genetic algorithm and active contour with an energy minimization procedure based on genetic algorithms. This method have been proposed to overcome some limits of classical active contours, as con-tour initialization and local minima (speckle noise), and have been successfully applied on medical ultrasound images. Experimental result on medical ultrasound image show that our presented method only can correctly segment the circular tissue’s on ultra-sound images.
Highlights
The ultrasound imaging method is used in medical practices, along with other imaging procedures such as XRay, CT, etc., for producing images of live tissue and for the purpose of clinical diagnosis
We presented a segmental method combined genetic algorithm and active contour with an energy minimization procedure based on genetic algorithms
This method have been proposed to overcome some limits of classical active contours, as contour initialization and local minima, and have been successfully applied on medical ultrasound images
Summary
The ultrasound imaging method is used in medical practices, along with other imaging procedures such as XRay, CT, etc., for producing images of live tissue and for the purpose of clinical diagnosis. The active contour is one of the methods used extensively in recent decades for segmentation of medical ultrasound images [6]. Kass [7] proposed the idea of using active contour for the first time This method is based on balancing the internal and external forces and minimizing energy. Investigations show that this procedure has produced acceptable results; it has several drawbacks and weak points. The first and the most important drawback is the entrapment of the active contour in the local points of minima, which causes the deviation of the contour from its original path This problem is magnified in the processing of ultrasound images that have higher noise levels.
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