3D segmentation of thyroid ultrasound images using active contours

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a method to segment the thyroid from a set of 2D ultrasound images. We extended an active contour model in 2D to generate a 3D segmented thyroid volume. First, a preprocessing step is carried out to suppress the noise present in US data. Second, an active contour is used to segment the thyroid in each of the 2D images. Finally, all the segmented thyroid images are passed to a 3D reconstruction algorithm to obtain a 3D model of the thyroid. We obtained an average segmentation accuracy of 86.7% in six datasets with a total of 703 images.

Keywords

• active contours without edges
• segmentation
• thyroid gland
• ultrasound