[Segmentation of ultrasonic medical image based on a symmetric region growing algorithm]

A method based on a symmetric region growing algorithm is presented for the segmentation of ultrasonic medical image. The method divides into three steps. First, according to the characteristic of the ultrasonic medical images, an adaptive weighted median filter is used to suppress speckle noise. Then, scan the digital image from the first row and grow regions from each scanned point by applying the growth criteria and combination criteria until all image pixels have been scanned. Examine the resulting regions using the seed criteria. If any point of a region satisfies the criteria for the region of interest region, assign the region to the resulting segmented image. The effectiveness of this method and a group of growth criteria as well as combination criteria applicable to ultrasonic medical image have been obtained by cardiac ultrasound image segmentation experiments. The experiment result shows that this method is good in the performance of the segmention of cardiac ultrasonic medical image.