An improved level set method of ultrasound imaging to detect blood vessel walls

This paper presents a new method for detecting the edge of intravascular ultrasound images, based on geometric active contours. The medical image segmentation method is based on the combination of traditional level set method and B-spline models. The new method only needs a few control points to achieve the effect of smoothing curves with drastic changes. Compared with the traditional level set function, this method has many advantages, such as no re-initializing to signed distance function, a higher curve smoothness and simple evolution and so on. Experimental results show that the algorithm can obtain segmentation results of medical image fast and accurately, and the method is reproducible and robust in image processing.