Automatic femur length measurement for fetal ultrasound image using localizing region-based active contour method

Abstract

This research aims to apply the localizing region-based active contour (LRAC) method to acquire the femur length in an ultrasound image automatically and to determine the effect of noise removal on the segmentation accuracy. The automatic femur length measurement system includes three main steps. The first step is the denoising process to reduce speckle noise in the ultrasound image. Afterwards, the LRAC method is applied to detect and segment a local region. The segmentation process with a certain number of iterations and a weight of the smoothing terms is started at the selected initial pixel. At the final step, the femur length is measured to estimate the gestational age. The experiment results show that the accuracy of the estimated gestational age increases significantly when the noise reduction technique is employed.