3-D breast ultrasound segmentation using active contour model.

In this study, we made use of the discrete active contour model to overcome the natural properties of ultrasound (US) images, speckle, noise and tissue-related textures, to segment the breast tumors precisely. Determination of the real tumor boundary with the snake-deformation process requires an initial contour estimate. However, the manual way to sketch an initial contour is very time-consuming. Thus, we propose an automatic initial contour-finding method that not only maintains the tumor shape, but also is close to the tumor boundary and inside the tumor. During the deformation process, to prevent the snake trapping into the false position caused by tissue-related texture or speckle, we added the edge information as an image feature to define the external force. In addition, because the 3-D volume of a tumor is essentially constructed by a sequence of 2-D images, our method for finding boundaries of a tumor can be extended to 3-D cases. By precisely counting the volume of the 3-D images, we can get the volume of tumor. Finally, we will show that the proposed techniques have rather good performance and lead to a satisfactory result in comparison with the estimated volume and physician's estimate.