Segmentation of ultrasound images using a spatially coherent generalized Rayleigh mixture model

This paper addresses the problem of jointly estimating the statistical distribution and segmenting multiple-tissue high-frequency ultrasound images. The distribution of multiple-tissue images is modeled as a spatially coherent finite mixture of heavy-tailed Rayleigh distributions. Spatial coherence inherent to biological tissues is introduced into the model by enforcing local dependance between pixels. An original Bayesian algorithm combined with a Markov chain Monte Carlo method is then derived to jointly estimate the mixture parameters and a label vector associating each voxel to a tissue. Precisely, a hybrid Metropolis-within-Gibbs sampler is proposed to draw samples that are asymptotically distributed according to the posterior distribution of the Bayesian model. These samples are then used to compute the Bayesian estimators of the model parameters. Simulation results are conducted on synthetic data to illustrate the performance of the proposed estimation strategy. The method is then successfully applied to the segmentation of an in-vivo lesion in a high frequency 3D ultrasound image.