Partial Differential Equations applied to Medical Image Segmentation
Subject Areas : International Journal of Industrial Mathematics
1 - Department of Mathematics, Firoozkooh Branch, Islamic Azad University, Firoozkooh, Iran.
2 - Department of Mathematics, Karaj Branch, Islamic Azad University, Karaj, Iran.
Keywords: Partial Differential Equations, Image segmentation, Level-sets, Abdominal, Thoracic aorta.,
Abstract :
This paper presents an application of partial differential equations(PDEs) for the segmentation of abdominal and thoracic aortic in CTA datasets. An important challenge in reliably detecting aortic is the need to overcome problems associated with intensity inhomogeneities. Level sets are part of an important class of methods that utilize partial differential equations (PDEs) and have been extensively applied in image segmentation. A kernel function in the level set formulation aids the suppression of noise in the extracted regions of interest and then guides the motion of the evolving contour for the detection of weak boundaries. The speed of curve evolution has been significantly improved with a resulting decrease in segmentation time compared with traditional implementations of level sets, and are shown to be more effective than other approaches in coping with intensity inhomogeneities. We have applied the Courant Friedrichs Levy (CFL) condition as stability criterion for our algorithm.