title: Active Contours Driven by Multi-Feature Gaussian Distribution Fitting Energy with Application to Vessel Segmentation.
abstract: Active contour models are of great importance for image segmentation and can extract smooth and closed boundary contours of the desired objects with promising results. However, they cannot work well in the presence of intensity inhomogeneity. Hence, a novel region-based active contour model is proposed by taking image intensities and 'vesselness values' from local phase-based vesselness enhancement into account simultaneously to define a novel multi-feature Gaussian distribution fitting energy in this paper. This energy is then incorporated into a level set formulation with a regularization term for accurate segmentations. Experimental results based on publicly available STructured Analysis of the Retina (STARE) demonstrate our model is more accurate than some existing typical methods and can successfully segment most small vessels with varying width.
authors.affiliation: Medical Imaging Department, Suzhou Institute of Biomedical Engineering and Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Suzhou, Jiangsu, China.
authors.forename: Lei
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.affiliation: Radiology Department, The First Hospital of JiLin University, Changchun, JiLin, China.
authors.forename: Huimao
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.affiliation: Radiology Department, The First Hospital of JiLin University, Changchun, JiLin, China.
authors.forename: Kan
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: He
authors.affiliation: Medical Imaging Department, Suzhou Institute of Biomedical Engineering and Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Suzhou, Jiangsu, China.
authors.forename: Yan
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Chang
authors.affiliation: Medical Imaging Department, Suzhou Institute of Biomedical Engineering and Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Suzhou, Jiangsu, China.
authors.forename: Xiaodong
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Yang
mesh_terms: D001808:Blood Vessels / Q000033:anatomy & histology*; D016208:Databases, Factual; D006801:Humans; D007089:Image Enhancement; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D016011:Normal Distribution; D012160:Retina / Q000033:anatomy & histology; D013816:Thermodynamics