A hybrid segmentation method based on Gaussian kernel fuzzy clustering and region based active contour model for ultrasound medical images

摘要

Segmentation is a very crucial task for the ultrasound medical images due to the presence of various imaging artifacts and noise. This paper presents a hybrid segmentation method for the ultrasound medical images that utilize both the features of the Gaussian kernel induced fuzzy C-means (GKFCM) clustering and active contour model driven by region scalable fitting (RSF) energy function. In this method, the result obtained from the GKFCM method is utilized to initialize the contour that spreads to identify the estimated regions. It also helps to estimate the several controlling parameters used in the curve evolution process. The RSF formulation that is responsible for attracting the contour toward the object boundaries removes the requirement of the re-initialization process. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated by conducting several experiments on both the synthetic and real ultrasound images. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method produces better results by successfully detecting the object boundaries and also ensures an improvement in segmentation accuracy compared to others. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.