Automatic measurement of infantile hemangiomas

Infantile hemangiomas (IH) are a type of benign vascular tumors that appear within the first 5 months of life. The assessment of lesion size and its evolution in time is done manually by the physician, using a ruler, and this measurement is not very accurate. This paper presents a method for automatic measurement of the IH size. The work is divided in two parts: automatic computation of the size of one millimeter in pixels, based on the Hough transform and the total variation, and automatic segmentation based on K-means clustering and a 2D total variation filtered image. The segmentation performance was evaluated on 20 IH images and a mean border error of 13.56% was obtained.