Active contour and segmentation models using geometric PDE's for medical imaging

This paper is devoted to the analysis and the extraction of information from bio-medical images. The proposed technique is based on object and contour detection, curve evolution and segmentation. We present a particular active contour model for 2D and 3D images, formulated using the level set method, and based on a 2-phase piecewise-constant segmentation. We then show how this model can be generalized to segmentation of images with more than two segments. The techniques used are based on the Mumford-Shah [21] model. By the proposed models, we can extract in addition measurements of the detected objects, such as average intensity, perimeter, area, or volume. Such informations are useful when in particular a time evolution of the subject is known, or when we need to make comparisons between different subjects, for instance between a normal subject and an abnormal one. Finally, all these will give more informations about the dynamic of a disease, or about how the human body growths. We illustrate the efficiency of the proposed models by calculations on two-dimensional and three-dimensional bio-medical images.