Ultrasound Image Segmentation With Shape Priors: Application to Automatic Cattle Rib-Eye Area Estimation

  • Authors:
  • P. Arias;A. Pini;G. Sanguinetti;P. Sprechmann;P. Cancela;A. Fernandez;A. Gomez;G. Randall

  • Affiliations:
  • Instituto de Ingenieria Electrica, Univ. de la Republica, Montevideo;-;-;-;-;-;-;-

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Transactions on Image Processing
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

Automatic ultrasound (US) image segmentation is a difficult task due to the quantity of noise present in the images and the lack of information in several zones produced by the acquisition conditions. In this paper, we propose a method that combines shape priors and image information to achieve this task. In particular, we introduce knowledge about the rib-eye shape using a set of images manually segmented by experts. A method is proposed for the automatic segmentation of new samples in which a closed curve is fitted taking into account both the US image information and the geodesic distance between the evolving curve and the estimated mean rib-eye shape in a shape space. This method can be used to solve similar problems that arise when dealing with US images in other fields. The method was successfully tested over a database composed of 610 US images, for which we have the manual segmentations of two experts