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Statistical Region Based Segmentation of Ultrasound Images
Segmentation of ultrasound images is a challenging problem due to speckle, which
corrupts the image and can result in weak or missing image boundaries, poor signal to
noise ratio, and diminished contrast resolution. Speckle is a random interference pattern
that is characterized by an asymmetric distribution as well as significant spatial correla-
tion. These attributes of speckle are challenging to model in a segmentation approach, so
many previous ultrasound segmentation methods simplify the problem by assuming that
the speckle is white and/or Gaussian distributed. Unlike these methods, in this paper
we present an ultrasound-specific segmentation approach that addresses both the spatial
correlation of the data as well as its intensity distribution. We first decorrelate the image
and then apply a region-based active contour whose motion is derived from an appropri-
ate parametric distribution for maximum likelihood image segmentation. We consider
zero-mean complex Gaussian, Rayleigh, and Fisher-Tippett flows, which are designed
to model fully formed speckle in the in-phase/quadrature (IQ), envelope detected, and
display (log compressed) images, respectively. We present experimental results demon-
strating the effectiveness of our method, and compare the results to other parametric
and non-parametric active contours