Segmentation of breast ultrasound images using neural networks

Abstract

Medical image segmentation is considered a very important task for diagnostic and treatment-planning purposes. Accurate segmentation of medical images helps clinicians to clarify the type of the disease and facilitates the process of efficient treatment. In this paper, we propose two different approaches to segment breast ultrasound images using neural networks. In the first approach, we use scale invariant feature transform (SIFT) to calculate a set of descriptors for a set of points inside the image. These descriptors are used to train a supervised neural network. In the second approach, we use SIFT to detect a set of key points inside the image. Texture features are then extracted from a region around each point to train the network. This process is repeated multiple times to verify the generalization ability of the network. The average segmentation accuracy is calculated by comparing every segmented image with corresponding gold standard images marked by an expert. © 2011 International Federation for Information Processing.