The class of deformable models has been broadly used in the segmentation of medical images. We propose a fast linkage contour, which is guided by some simple evolution rules, to extract the boundaries of objects in 2D images. A Moving Linkage consists of links, each of which is further composed of a tail joint and a head joint. Classified into horizontal, vertical and frozen (unmoved) types, the links are constricted on grids by the horizontal and vertical tracks corresponding to the image pixels. Drawing an analogy between an electric current flowing along a circuit line in the presence of magnetic fields and how it reacts in response to the force, we use the right-hand rule to guide the motion of each link. In our approach, a small closed linkage contour is initialized inside the region of interest. Stealing the concept of entropy conditions from level sets, the linkage contour is easily grown, split and merged governed by some simple deformation rules. The frozen link occurs once the speed of the free link (horizontal or vertical) is less than a specified threshold due to significant image gradients. The deformation procedure is repeated until all links become frozen, when the linkage contour resides on the edge of the segmented object. This new deformable model was validated by the preliminary segmentation results regarding phantom and medical images.

Date Published: 12 May 2004
PDF: 12 pages
Proc. SPIE 5370, Medical Imaging 2004: Image Processing, (12 May 2004); doi: 10.1117/12.536554

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 5370:
Medical Imaging 2004: Image Processing
J. Michael Fitzpatrick; Milan Sonka, Editor(s)