Ultrasound object detection using morphological region-based active contour: an application system
Résumé
Ultrasound (US) is intensively employed as a screening tool for suspicious objects such as breast lesions and thyroid nodules. Avoiding the subjectivity radiologists and to overcome high variability of US interpretations among them, technological innovations in computer aided diagnosis or CAD are massively developed. Automation and accuracy in object detection and segmentation techniques as the core of CAD are becoming prestigious knowledge creations in the current industrial revolution 4.0. In this paper, an application system of morphological region-based active contour called MoRbAC is presented to automatically detect the suspicious US objects. Global segmentation for detecting all US objects is carried out by simplified region based active contour in the start of MoRbACs work. A series of morphological operations are then optimized to enhance erroneous global segmentation results due to inhomogeneity of noisy US images. The localization of targeted suspicious objects is finally obtained through comparative calculation of area similarity. The proposed MoRbAC application was validated by applying it to detect breast lesions and thyroid nodules on 20 real US images. Quantitative measurements based on overlapping area compared to referred ground truth achieve an average accuracy of up to 98.58