Boundary delineation for hepatic hemangioma in ultrasound images

Hemangioma is one of the most common benign congenital complications of the human body which can arise in interior organs and external limbs. The main aim of this work is to present a new method for automatic detection of liver hemangioma and its boundaries in ultrasound images, using image processing techniques. Overall there are two phases, the preprocessing procedure and the boundary delineation phase. The preprocessing phase includes three main stages: 1. Image contrast enhancement using Difference of Offset Gaussian (DoOG) method, 2. Applying Canny edge filtering, 3. Applying an adaptive threshold in order to detect the ROI (hemangioma). Following, the snake algorithm is used to segment the hemangioma region in the second phase. For the quantitative assessment of the proposed method for the segmentation stage, the results derived via the proposed algorithms have been compared with the corresponding segmented regions determined by an expert using three similarity criteria. The results showed 73 percent similarity without pre-processing and 90 percent similarity with pre-processing.