A robust region-based active contour model with point classification for ultrasound breast lesion segmentation

Lesion segmentation is one of the key technologies for computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) system. In this paper, we propose a robust region-based active contour model (ACM) with point classification to segment high-variant breast lesion in ultrasound images. First, a local signed pressure force (LSPF) function is proposed to classify the contour points into two classes: local low contrast class and local high contrast class. Secondly, we build a sub-model for each class. For low contrast class, the sub-model is built by combining global energy with local energy model to find a global optimal solution. For high contrast class, the sub-model is just the local energy model for its good level set initialization. Our final energy model is built by adding the two sub-models. Finally, the model is minimized and evolves the level set contour to get the segmentation result. We compare our method with other state-of-art methods on a very large ultrasound database and the result shows that our method can achieve better performance.