Connectivity Enhancement of Broken Structural Regions in Ultrasound Images

This paper is to propose a method to enhance the connectivity of the broken structures. The pixels to be connected are found by a decision rule which is based on the intensity and gradient information of the neighboring pixels. The intensity of the pixel, if it is decided to be filled, is increased so that the pixel together with its neighbors looks connected. The anisotropic diffusion follows to make the connected structural region look more natural. The same structure matrices have been used both to get gradient information and to decide the direction of diffusion to improve the computational speed. It has been shown by the experiments on the real ultrasound images that the broken structural regions can be connected by the proposed method.