Labeling skin tissues in ultrasound images using a generalized Rayleigh mixture model

This paper addresses the problem of estimating the statistical distribution of multiple-tissue non-stationary ultrasound images of skin. The distribution of multiple-tissue images is modeled as a finite mixture of Heavy-Tailed Rayleigh distributions. 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 detection of an in-vivo skin lesion in a high frequency 3D ultrasound image.