Boundary Delineation in Prostate Imaging Using Active Contour Segmentation Method with Interactively Defined Object Regions

Abstract

Active contour methods are often methods of choice for demanding segmentation problems, yet segmentation of medical images with complex intensity patterns still remains a challenge for these methods. This paper proposes a method to incorporate interactively specified foreground/background regions into the active model framework while keeping the user interaction to the minimum. To achieve that, the proposed functional to be minimized includes a term to encourage active contour to separate the points close to the specified foreground region from the points close to the specified background region in terms of geodesic distance. The experiments on multi-modal prostate images demonstrate that the proposed method not only can achieve robust and accurate results, but also provides an efficient way to interactively improve the results.