Deformable segmentation of 3-D ultrasound prostate images using statistical texture matching method

This paper presents a novel deformable model for automatic segmentation of prostates from three-dimensional ultrasound images, by statistical matching of both shape and texture. A set of Gabor-support vector machines (G-SVMs) are positioned on different patches of the model surface, and trained to adaptively capture texture priors of ultrasound images for differentiation of prostate and nonprostate tissues in different zones around prostate boundary. Each G-SVM consists of a Gabor filter bank for extraction of rotation-invariant texture features and a kernel support vector machine for robust differentiation of textures. In the deformable segmentation procedure, these pretrained G-SVMs are used to tentatively label voxels around the surface of deformable model as prostate or nonprostate tissues by a statistical texture matching. Subsequently, the surface of deformable model is driven to the boundary between the tentatively labeled prostate and nonprostate tissues. Since the step of tissue labeling and the step of label-based surface deformation are dependent on each other, these two steps are repeated until they converge. Experimental results by using both synthesized and real data show the good performance of the proposed model in segmenting prostates from ultrasound images.

I. Introduction

Segmentation of meaningful objects from images is an important task in computer vision. Recently, medical image segmentation has been actively studied, in order to automatically measure or track the anatomical structures for clinical applications [1]. One of the most challenging and practical applications is the segmentation of prostates from three-dimensional (3-D) ultrasound (US) images, for the purpose of prostate cancer diagnosis and image-guided surgical planning and therapy.