Medical image segmentation by combing the local, global enhancement, and active contour model

The objects in the medical images are not visible due to low contrast and the noise. In general, X-ray, computed tomography (CT), and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) images are often affected by blurriness, lack of contrast, which are very important for the accuracy of medical diagnosis. It is difficult to segmentation in such case without losing the details of the objects. The goal of image enhancement is to improve certain details of an image and to improve its visual quality. So, image enhancement technology is one of the key procedures in image segmentation for medical imaging. This article presents a two-stage approach, combining novel and traditional algorithms, for the enhancement and segmentation of images of bones obtained from CT. The first stage is a new combined local and global transform domain-based image enhancement algorithm. The basic idea of using local alfa-rooting method is to apply it to different disjoint blocks of different sizes. We used image enhancement non-reference quality measure for optimization alfa-rooting parameters. The second stage applies the modified active contour method based on an anisotropic gradient. The simulation results of the proposed algorithm are compared with other state-of-the-art segmentation methods, and its superiority in the presence of noise and blurred edges on the database of CT images is illustrated.