Automatic extraction of subcutaneous fat from ultrasound images of cervical vertebrae

作者：Kim Kwang Baek^*; Park Hyun Jun; Song Doo Heon; Jang Man Chul; Kim Jong Bae

来源：Asia Life Sciences, 2016, 25(1): 155-165.

• cervical vertebrae
• subcutaneous fat
• fuzzy sigma binarization
• ultrasound sonography
• cutaneous layer

Analyzing cervical vertebra is an important topic of caring patients with neck pains. While being noninvasive, cheap, and having real time convenience, ultrasound sonographic analysis has problems on subjectivity of inspectors. Thus, we need fully automatic assisting software for extracting major organs around cervical vertebrae. In this paper, we propose a method for automatic extraction of subcutaneous fat area with various image processing techniques. Carefully designed procedure including combining two types of binarization processes is the key point of the proposed method. Computationally heavy but sensitive adaptable fuzzy sigma binarization and simple thresholding binarization result are combined and the connectivity of the boundary lines is compensated by cubic spline interpolation. In experiment, the proposed method shows 97.6% success rate of extracting target area.

• 出版日期2016-7