Phase based level set segmentation of ultrasound images

Ultrasound images segmentation is a difficult problem due to speckle noise, low contrast and local changes of intensity. Intensity based methods do not perform particularly well on ultrasound images. However, it has been previously shown that these images respond well to local phase-based methods which are theoretically intensity-invariant. Here, we use level set propagation to capture the left ventricle boundaries. This uses a new speed term based on local phase and local orientation derived from the monogenic signal, which makes the algorithm robust to attenuation artefact. Furthermore, we use Cauchy kernels, instead of the commonly used log-Gabor, as pair of quadrature filters for the feature extraction. Preliminary results show that the proposed method can robustly handle noise, and captures well the low contrast boundaries.