Semi-automatic Fisher-Tippett guided active contour for lumbar multifidus muscle segmentation

Rehabilitative Ultrasound Imaging or diagnostic ultrasound is used to measure geometric properties of the lumbar multifidus muscle to infer muscle strength or degeneration for back pain therapy. For this purpose, a novel semi-automatic approach (FTS: Fisher-Tippett Segmentation) based upon the Decoupled Active Contour is proposed to reliably and quickly segment the lumbar multifidus muscle in diagnostic ultrasound. To overcome speckle or hardly visible region boundaries in ultrasound images, we first propose a novel external energy functional to explicitly consider the underlying Fisher-Tippett distribution of ultrasound data. We then introduce a user-guided Hidden Markov Model trellis formation for improved segmentation of weakly-defined regions. Extensive experiments have shown that our approach not only improves the segmentation performance when compared to existing methods, but also does not rely on sub-specialized knowledge for segmentation.