A unified level set framework utilizing parameter priors for medical image segmentation

Image segmentation plays an important role in many medical imaging systems, yet in complex circumstances it remains an open problem. One of the main difficulties is the intensity inhomogeneity in an image. In order to tackle this problem, we first introduce a region-based level set segmentation framework to unify the traditional global and local methods. We then propose two novel parameter priors, i.e., the local order regularization and interactive regularization, and then utilize them as the constraints of the objective energy function. The objective energy function is finally minimized via a level set evolution process to achieve image segmentation. Extensive experiments show that the proposed approach has gained significant improvements in both accuracy and efficiency over the state-of-the-art methods.