Automatic gallbladder and gallstone regions segmentation in ultrasound image

As gallbladder diseases including gallstone and cholecystitis are mainly diagnosed by using ultra-sonographic examinations, we propose a novel method to segment the gallbladder and gallstones in ultrasound images.

The method is divided into five steps. Firstly, a modified Otsu algorithm is combined with the anisotropic diffusion to reduce speckle noise and enhance image contrast. The Otsu algorithm separates distinctly the weak edge regions from the central region of the gallbladder. Secondly, a global morphology filtering algorithm is adopted for acquiring the fine gallbladder region. Thirdly, a parameter-adaptive pulse-coupled neural network (PA-PCNN) is employed to obtain the high-intensity regions including gallstones. Fourthly, a modified region-growing algorithm is used to eliminate physicians' labeled regions and avoid over-segmentation of gallstones. It also has good self-adaptability within the growth cycle in light of the specified growing and terminating conditions. Fifthly, the smoothing contours of the detected gallbladder and gallstones are obtained by the locally weighted regression smoothing (LOESS).

We test the proposed method on the clinical data from Gansu Provincial Hospital of China and obtain encouraging results. For the gallbladder and gallstones, average similarity percent of contours (EVA) containing metrics dice's similarity , overlap fraction and overlap value is 86.01 and 79.81%, respectively; position error is 1.7675 and 0.5414 mm, respectively; runtime is 4.2211 and 0.6603 s, respectively. Our method then achieves competitive performance compared with the state-of-the-art methods.

The proposed method is potential to assist physicians for diagnosing the gallbladder disease rapidly and effectively.