Adaptive weighted curvature-based active contour for ultrasonic and 3T/5T MR image segmentation

Image segmentation is a complex and core technique for disease diagnosis or image-guided surgery in the medical image domain. However, low-quality images, such as images with weak edges and intensity inhomogeneities, may bring considerable challenges for radiologists. In this paper, we propose an adaptive weighted curvature-based active contour model by coupling heat kernel convolution and adaptively weighted high-order total variation for medical image segmentation to improve diagnosis effectiveness. To reduce the computational complexity, the heat kernel convolution operation is applied to approximate the perimeter of a segmentation curve. In addition, the weighted parameter included in the high-order total variation term can be automatically evaluated based on an adaptive input image to emphasize local structures and increase segmentation accuracy. Since the proposed method is a smoothing optimization model, the alternating direction method of multipliers is introduced to translate the original problems into several easily solvable subproblems. The numerical experimental results on ultrasonic and 3T/5T MRI datasets demonstrate that the proposed model is quite efficient and robust compared with several traditional segmentation methods.