Novel VLSI architecture for real time medical image segmentation

Image segmentation plays an important role in the processing of medical images. Segmentation of medical images is a challenging task due to the poor image contrast and the diffusion of organs or tissue boundaries. Due to the emergence of new trends in the engineering technologies many medical diagnosis methods are automated using the image processing principles. Hence in this paper hardware implementation of segmentation of brain tumors is carried out using Xilinx System Generator (XSG) and FPGA. It results in greater performance, less design time and cost than the existing programmable Digital Signal Processors (DSPs) or than even PCs with coprocessors due to lot of parallelism and pipelining. Use of XSG for medical image processing applications effectively reduces the intricacies existing in architecture design and also provides additional feature of hardware co-simulation.