Phase portrait analysis for automatic initialization of multiple snakes for segmentation of the ultrasound images of breast cancer

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Segmentation of ultrasound (US) images of breast cancer is one of the most challenging problems of modern medical image processing. A number of popular codes for US segmentation are based on the active contours (snakes) and on a variety of modifications of gradient vector flow. The snakes have been used to locate objects in various applications of medical images. However, the main difficulty in applying the method is initialization. Therefore, we suggest a new method for automatic initialization of active contours based on phase portrait analysis (PPA) of the underlying vector field and a sequential initialization of trial multiple snakes. The PPA makes it possible to exclude the noise and artifacts and properly initialize the multiple snakes. In turn, the trial snakes allow us to differentiate between the seeds initialized inside and outside the desired object. While preceding methods require the manual selection of at least one seed point inside the object or rely on the particular distribution of the gray levels, the proposed method is fully automatic and robust to the noise, as can be seen from the tests with synthetic and real images.