Automatic Segmentation and Measurement of Infantile Hemangioma

Abstract

Infantile hemangiomas (IHs) are a type of vascular tumors that affect around 10% of newborns. The measurement of the lesion size and the assessment of the evolution is done manually by the physician. This paper presents an algorithm for the automatic computation of the IH lesion surface. The image scale is computed by using the Hough transform and the total variation. As pre-processing, a geometric correction step is included, which ensures that the lesions are viewed as perpendicular to the camera. The image segmentation is based on K-means clustering applied on a five-plane image; the five planes being selected from seven planes with the use of the Karhunen-Loeve transform. Two of the seven planes are 2D total variation filters, based on symmetrical kernels, designed to highlight the IH specific texture. The segmentation performance was assessed on 30 images, and a mean border error of 9.31% was obtained.

Keywords

• infantile hemangiomas
• Hough transform
• image segmentation
• K-means
• total variation