Ultrasound image segmentation with shape priors: application to automatic cattle rib-eye area estimation. |
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Authors: | Pablo Arias Alejandro Pini Gonzalo Sanguinetti Pablo Sprechmann Pablo Cancela Alicia Fernández Alvaro Gómez Gregory Randall |
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Affiliation: | Instituto de Ingeniería Eléctrica, Universidad de la República, Montevideo 11300, Uruguay. parias@fing.edu.uy |
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Abstract: | Automatic ultrasound (US) image segmentation is a difficult task due to the quantity of noise present in the images and the lack of information in several zones produced by the acquisition conditions. In this paper, we propose a method that combines shape priors and image information to achieve this task. In particular, we introduce knowledge about the rib-eye shape using a set of images manually segmented by experts. A method is proposed for the automatic segmentation of new samples in which a closed curve is fitted taking into account both the US image information and the geodesic distance between the evolving curve and the estimated mean rib-eye shape in a shape space. This method can be used to solve similar problems that arise when dealing with US images in other fields. The method was successfully tested over a database composed of 610 US images, for which we have the manual segmentations of two experts. |
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