Segmentation of Inhomogeneous Skin Tissues in High-frequency 3D Ultrasound Images, the Advantage of Non-parametric Log-likelihood Methods

AbstractWe propose a multi-purpose level-set segmentation algorithm to detect the boundary of tumors and tissues in high-frequency 3D ultrasound images of the skin. Whereas most proposed algorithms assume a specific (e.g. Rayleigh) distribution of the speckle noise, we do not make such assumption and use non-parametric Parzen estimates of the distribution. We discuss the advantage of the method on synthetic and clinical images of the skin and tumors