Breast ultrasound image co-segmentation by means of multiple-domain knowledge

Because of low signal-noise ratio, low contrast and blurry boundaries, breast ultrasound (BUS) image segmentation is quite challenging. In this paper, a multiple-domain knowledge based co-segmentation model is proposed for BUS segmentation. It combines spatial and frequency domain prior knowledge and introduces the idea of co-segmentation to segment BUS sequence. First, tumor poses, position and intensity distribution are modeled to constrain the segmentation in the spatial domain, and then the phase feature and zero-crossing feature in the frequency domain. Finally, the BUS sequence segmentation is formulated as a co-segmentation problem. Experimental results show that the proposed method can handle low contrast and hypoechoic BUS images well and segment BUS accurately.