Open AccessMorphological active contour without edge‐based model for real‐time and non‐rigid uterine fibroid tracking in HIFU treatment
Author(s) -
Ning Guochen,
Zhang Xinran,
Liao Hongen
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
healthcare technology letters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.45
H-Index - 19
ISSN - 2053-3713
DOI - 10.1049/htl.2019.0067
Subject(s) - contouring , computer vision , artificial intelligence , computer science , active contour model , region of interest , intersection (aeronautics) , image segmentation , segmentation , computer graphics (images) , engineering , aerospace engineering
High‐intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) therapy represents an image‐guided and non‐invasive surgical approach to treat uterine fibroid. During the HIFU operation, it is challenging to obtain the real‐time and accurate lesion contour automatically in ultrasound (US) video. The current intraoperative image processing is completed manually or semi‐automatic. In this Letter, the authors propose a morphological active contour without an edge‐based model to obtain accurate real‐time and non‐rigid US lesion contour. Firstly, a targeted image pre‐processing procedure is applied to reduce the influence of inadequate image quality. Then, an improved morphological contour detection method with a customised morphological kernel is harnessed to solve the low signal‐to‐noise ratio of HIFU US images and obtain an accurate non‐rigid lesion contour. A more reasonable lesion tracking procedure is proposed to improve tracking accuracy especially in the case of large displacement and incomplete lesion area. The entire framework is accelerated by the GPU to achieve a high frame rate. Finally, a non‐rigid, real‐time and accurate lesion contouring for intraoperative US video is provided to the doctor. The proposed procedure could reach a speed of more than 30 frames per second in general computer and a Dice similarity coefficient of 90.67% and Intersection over Union of 90.14%.