Modified fast marching and level set method for medical image segmentation

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Zhu, Fuping | Tian, Jie

Affiliations: Medical Image Processing Group, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing P.O. Box 2728, 100080, China. Tel.: +86 10 62532105; Fax: +86 10 62527995

Note: [] Corresponding author. E-mail: tian@doctor.com

Abstract: In this paper, an interactive segmentation method that combines fast marching and level set method is proposed. Level set segmentation involves solving the energy-based active contour minimization problems by the computation of geodesics or minimal distance curves. First, by selecting the seed point, the fast marching method is used to extract rough boundaries of the interested object. We modified the traditional fast marching method to capture the weak edges by introducing watershed transform. Then, the contour obtained from the fast marching method mentioned above is regarded as an initialization and the level set method is used to finely tune the contour. The algorithm is demonstrated on some medical images: segmentation of knee tissues in CT image and segmentation of brain tissues in MR image. The results show that this method can remove the small regions obtained from fast marching method and converge the desired boundary.

Journal: Journal of X-Ray Science and Technology, vol. 11, no. 4, pp. 193-204, 2003