Texture-oriented anisotropic filtering and geodesic active contours in breast tumor ultrasound segmentation

Abstract

In this paper we present an anisotropic filter for speckle reduction in ultrasound images and an adaptation of the geodesic active contours technique for the segmentation of breast tumors. The anisotropic diffusion we propose is based on a texture description provided by a set of Gabor filters and allows reducing speckle noise while preserving edges. Furthermore, it is used to extract an initial pre-segmentation of breast tumors which is used as initialization for the active contours technique. This technique has been adapted to the characteristics of ultrasonography by adding certain texture-related terms which provide a better discrimination of the regions inside and outside the nodules. These terms allow obtaining a more accurate contour when the gradients are not high and uniform.