Combining CRF and multi-hypothesis detection for accurate lesion segmentation in breast sonograms

Abstract

The implementation of lesion segmentation for breast ultrasound image relies on several diagnostic rules on intensity, texture, etc. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm to achieve a comprehensive decision upon these rules by incorporating image over-segmentation and lesion detection in a pairwise CRF model, rather than a term-by-term translation. Multiple detection hypotheses are used to propagate object-level cues to segments and a unified classifier is trained based on the concatenated features. The experimental results show that our algorithm can avoid the drawbacks of separate detection or bottom-up segmentation, and can deal with very complicated cases.