Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SC (전자공학회논문지SC)

The Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers (대한전자공학회)
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Rate-Distortion Based Segmentation of Tumor Region in an Breast Ultrasound Volume Image

유방 초음파 볼륨영상에서의 율왜곡 기반 종양영역 분할

  • Kwak, Jong-In (Department of Electronic Engineering, Kyungpook National University) ;
  • Kim, Sang-Hyun (Department of Multimedia Engineering, Youngsan University) ;
  • Kim, Nam-Chul (Department of Electronic Engineering, Kyungpook National University)
  • 곽종인 (경북대학교 전자공학과) ;
  • 김상현 (영산대학교 멀티미디어공학부) ;
  • 김남철 (경북대학교 전자공학과)
  • Published : 2005.09.25
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Abstract

This paper proposes an efficient algorithm for extracting a tumor region from an breast ultrasound volume image by using rate-distortion (R-D) based seeded region growing. In the proposed algorithm the rate and the distortion represent the roughness of the contour and the dissimilarity of pixels in a region, respectively. Staring from an initial seed region set in each cutting plane of a volume, a pair of the seed region and one of adjacent regions whose R-D cost is minimal is searched and then they are merged into a new updated seed region. This procedure is recursively performed until the averaged R-D cost values per the number of contour pixels in the seed region becomes maxim. As a result, the final seed region has good pixel homogeneity and a much smooth contour. Finally, the tumor volume is extracted using the contours of the final seed regions in all the cutting planes. Experimental results show that the averaged error rate of the proposed method is shown to be below 4%.

본 논문에서는 유방 초음파 볼륨영상에서 진단하고자 하는 종양 영역을 율왜곡 기반(rate-distortion based) 시드영역 확장 법으로 분할하는 알고리듬을 제안한다. 제안된 분할법에서는 율은 윤곽의 거친 정도를 나타내고 왜곡은 영역의 동질성 정도를 나타내는데, 흉부 종양 볼륨으로부터 획득한 2차원 단면 영상에서 설정된 초기 시드영역에서 시작하여 이러한 율과 왜곡을 동시에 최소화하는 주위영역 중 하나씩 시드영역으로 병합한다. 이러한 병합은 시드영역의 윤곽 화소당 평균 율왜곡 비용이 최대가 될 때까지 반복적으로 수행한다. 이렇게 함으로써 최종 시드영역은 동질성이 잘 유지되고 부드러운 윤곽을 갖게 된다. 마지막으로 모든 단면 영상에 있는 최종 시드영역의 윤곽들을 이용하여 3차원 흉부 종양을 추출한다. 실험 결과, 제안한 방법이 초음파 데이터에 대하여 평균 에러율이 약 4% 미만으로 나타났다.

Keywords

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