• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.40 no.5
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• pp.179-188
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• 2019

In ultrasound telemedicine, it is important to reduce the size of the data by compressing the ultrasound image when sending it. Ultrasound images can be divided into image context and other information consisting of patient ID, date, and several letters. Between them, ultrasound context is very important information for diagnosis and should be securely preserved as much as possible. In several previous papers, ultrasound compression methods were proposed to compress ultrasound context and other information into different compression parameters. This ultrasound compression method minimized the loss of ultrasound context while greatly compressing other information. This paper proposed the method of automatic segmentation of ultrasound context to overcome the limitation of the previously described ultrasound compression method. This algorithm was designed to robust for various ultrasound device and to enable real-time operation to maintain the benefits of ultrasound imaging machine. The operation time of extracting ultrasound context through the proposed segmentation method was measured, and it took 311.11 ms. In order to optimize the algorithm, the ultrasound context was segmented with down sampled input image. When the resolution of the input image was reduced by half, the computational time was 126.84 ms. When the resolution was reduced by one-third, it took 45.83 ms to segment the ultrasound context. As a result, we verified through experiments that the proposed method works in real time.