Using shapes correlation for active contour segmentation of uterine fibroid ultrasound images in computer-aided therapy

Segmenting the lesion regions from the ultrasound (US) images is an important step in the intra-operative planning of some computer-aided therapies. High-Intensity Focused Ultrasound (HIFU), as a popular computer-aided therapy, has been widely used in the treatment of uterine fibroids. However, such segmentation in HIFU remains challenge for two reasons: (1) the blurry or missing boundaries of lesion regions in the HIFU images and (2) the deformation of uterine fibroids caused by the patient's breathing or an external force during the US imaging process, which can lead to complex shapes of lesion regions. These factors have prevented classical active contour-based segmentation methods from yielding desired results for uterine fibroids in US images. In this paper, a novel active contour-based segmentation method is proposed, which utilizes the correlation information of target shapes among a sequence of images as prior knowledge to aid the existing active contour method. This prior knowledge can be interpreted as a unsupervised clustering of shapes prior modeling. Meanwhile, it is also proved that the shapes correlation has the low-rank property in a linear space, and the theory of matrix recovery is used as an effective tool to impose the proposed prior on an existing active contour model. Finally, an accurate method is developed to solve the proposed model by using the Augmented Lagrange Multiplier (ALM). Experimental results from both synthetic and clinical uterine fibroids US image sequences demonstrate that the proposed method can consistently improve the performance of active contour models and increase the robustness against missing or misleading boundaries, and can greatly improve the efficiency of HIFU therapy.