Extracting gall bladders from ultrasound images

Nowadays, the internal images of a human body can be easily provided by the ultrasound imaging, the X-ray CT, or the MRI device, among which the ultrasound imaging device has good resolution for soft tissues of a human body compared with the other devices. Furthermore, the use of ultrasound imaging devices will increase in future especially in the obstetrics, territory, since it does not give harm to the human body. Although several techniques have been investigated until now in order to extract organs from ultrasound images, very few of them have achieved satisfactory results because of low contrast and high noise nature of images. This paper proposes a technique for automatic extraction of the gall bladder area from ultrasound images. The proposed technique first extracts a small reliable area of a gall bladder from an ultrasound image employing smoothing, binarization, expanding and shrinking, and labeling, and then expands the area referring to the binarized version of the original image. The technique is examined its performance by real ultrasound images of a gall bladder and satisfactory results are obtained. Some problems to be solved are discussed finally.