Circular Vector Field Analysis for the Adaptive Diffusion Flow Snakes Applied to Ultrasound Images of Breast Cancer

A number of popular methods for segmentation are based on a generalized gradient vector flow (GGVF) snakes. One of the most successful recent extensions of this idea is the adaptive diffusion flow (ADF) snake. However, the good choice of the control parameters of the ADF such as the Gaussian smoothing coefficients and the weights associated with harmonic hypersurface functional and the infinity Laplacian are hard to select. In turn, the wrong choice often leads to inappropriate results. In this paper, we propose a new method to select the control parameters of ADF based on the vector field analysis (VFA). The experimental results obtained on a set of 40 US images of breast tumor show that the ADF combined with the VFA outperforms the original ADF.