Follicle detection using region growing

Coordinators: B. Potocnik and D. Zazula

An improved algorithm is presented for ovarian follicle detection in ultrasound images. This fully automated recognition algorithm is composed of three successive steps. First, initial homogeneous regions are determined. Then, these initial regions are grown. The growing is controlled by average grey-level and by a newly introduced weighted image gradient. In the last stage regions are extracted that are probably follicles. The algorithm has been tested on 50 ovarian ultrasound images. The recognition rate of follicles using this procedure was around 78 %. A possible extention of the algorithm deals with the entire information in the ultrasound image sequence.

Main idea (slides from conference IWISPA 2000, Pula, Croatia)

Papers

B. Potocnik and D. Zazula, "Automated Analysis of a Sequence of Ovarian Ultrasound Images, Part I: Segmentation of Single 2D Images", Image and Vision Computing, 2000, submitted.