A Novel Method for Medical Ultrasound Image Segmentation

Segmentation of ultrasound images is difficult due to discontinuity and uncertainty of segmentation boundaries caused by speckle noise. Most of the ultrasound image segmentation algorithms require high computational time and do not give good results. In this paper, a novel algorithm for the ultrasound image segmentation is proposed. Our approach is based on semi-automatic classical region growing segmentation algorithm. Given a seed point by user, one can automatically and quickly segment the object from the image. We developed a mechanism to add groups of pixels to the segmented object. Our growing mechanism uses the distances between the distributions as the criteria to solve the speckle noise problem in the ultrasound images. Minimizing the distances between the distributions allow us to find the borders. The performance and the results of the proposed method are tested in different set of ultrasound images.