Prototype of a rectal wall ultrasound image analysis system

Abstract

This paper presents a software system prototype for rectal wall ultrasound image processing, image display and 3D reconstruction and visualization of the rectal wall structure, which is aimed to help surgeons cope with large quantities of rectal wall ultrasound images. On the core image processing algorithm part, a novel multigradient field active contour model proposed by authors is used to complete the multi-layer boundary detection of the rectal wall. A novel unifying active contour model, which combines region information, gradient information and contour's internal constraint, is developed for tumor boundary detection. The region statistical information is described accurately by Gaussian Mixture Model, whose parameter solution is computed by Expectation-Maximization algorithm. The whole system is set up on Java platform. Java JAI technology is used for 2D image display, Java3D technology is employed for 3D reconstruction and visualization. The system prototype is currently composed of three main modules: image processing, image display and 3D visualization.