Breast nodule ultrasound segmentation through texture-based active contours

Abstract

This work presents a method for the segmentation of breast nodules in ultrasonography. Speckle noise is reduced using an anisotropic filter for which texture is described using Gabor filters. Afterwards, an initial segmentation is extracted using a front propagation scheme. Finally, the initial segmentation is refined using active contours. In order to delimit the nodules not only by means of image intensity, but also by texture pattern, we introduce certain terms in the classical active contours equations.