Open AccessAutomatic measurement of dermal thickness from B‐scan ultrasound images using active contours
Author(s) -
Lagarde JeanMichel,
George Jéróme,
Soulcié Romain,
Black David
Publication year - 2005
Publication title -
skin research and technology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.521
H-Index - 69
eISSN - 1600-0846
pISSN - 0909-752X
DOI - 10.1111/j.1600-0846.2005.00108.x
Subject(s) - computer science , ultrasound , artificial intelligence , active contour model , computer vision , process (computing) , operator (biology) , semi automatic , pattern recognition (psychology) , biomedical engineering , image (mathematics) , image segmentation , radiology , medicine , engineering , mechanical engineering , biochemistry , chemistry , repressor , transcription factor , gene , operating system
Background/purpose: Measurement of dermal thickness is useful in the evaluation of dermo‐cosmetics for assessing not only morphological changes but also mechanical properties of this layer. Our aim was first to standardise the manual dermal thickness measurement procedure on B‐scan ultrasound images, then to develop an automatic operator independent method to detect the boundaries of the dermis. Material and methods: The Dermcup ® 20 MHz B‐scan ultrasound system was used. The method used for detecting the boundaries was adapted from active contour algorithms. The innovative aspect of the method consists in an automatic initialisation of the first step of the algorithm. To validate the method, we correlated measurements obtained by the manual and automatic approaches from a set of images from different anatomical sites. Results and conclusion: The results showed for the two measurement methods, 72% of the images were perfectly correlated. The remaining images required manual initialisation of the boundaries by a non‐expert operator before the active contour process could be used. Subsequent to this semi‐automatic procedure, the correlation was very high.