Automatic Deep Active Contour Model Based on Local Image Characteristics

In recent years, convolutional neural networks have made remarkable achievements in medical image segmentation. Unclear margins and fuzzy boundary regions are formed surrounding the thyroid gland area under the influence of artifacts and speckles, which increases the difficulty of thyroid ultrasound image segmentation. However, building an effective CNN model usually requires massive computing resources, long training time, and large amounts of carefully labeled data. In this work, we develop a fast, compact, accurate and robust image segmentation model for automatic thyroid segmentation in medical ultrasound images. We propose an automatic deep active contour (DAC) model based on local image characteristics, which utilizes the deep neural network model to obtain the initial contour and constructs external energy items based on the local image characteristics of contour points. Compared with the deep neural network model, the DAC model requires less training data, and the segmentation performance of the DAC model on a small dataset can reach that of the deep neural network model on a larger dataset. The proposed DAC model can be used for automatic thyroid segmentation in medical ultrasound images, which does not require massive computing resources, long training time, and large amounts of carefully labeled data.