Quantification of Thyroid Volume Using 3-D Ultrasound Imaging

Abstract

Abstract-Ultrasound (US) is among the most popular diagnostic techniques today. It is non-invasive, fast, comparably cheap, and does not require ionizing radiation. US is commonly used to examine the size, and structure of the thyroid gland. In clinical routine, thyroid imaging is usually performed by means of 2-D US. Conventional approaches for measuring the volume of the thyroid gland or its nodules may therefore be inaccurate due to the lack of 3-D information. This work reports a semi-automatic segmentation approach for the classification, and analysis of the thyroid gland based on 3-D US data. The images are scanned in 3-D, pre-processed, and segmented. Several pre-processing methods, and an extension of a commonly used geodesic active contour level set formulation are discussed in detail. The results obtained by this approach are compared to manual interactive segmentations by a medical expert in five representative patients. Our work proposes a novel framework for the volumetric quantification of thyroid gland lobes, which may also be expanded to other parenchymatous organs.

Automated segmentation of ultrasonic volumetric data of composite materials

“…This method has been used to segment ultrasound data. Recent applications of a level set-based active contour can be found in [9,11,12] . A major disadvantage of active contour models is the requirement for a good initialisation in order to not fall on local minima of the energy function.…”

Identification of Structures in Medical Images

“…Ultrasound has become the most important technique for thyroid gland imaging and computerized systems have been described to aid doctors in the task of thyroid image analysis. Hegedüs (2004) and Kollorz et al (2008) presented methods to automatically isolate the thyroid gland in US images, using geodesic active contour level set based approach.…”

MRI Determination of Knee Effusion Volume: A Cadaveric Study

“…Automated volume segmentation has been demonstrated to be accurate in the measurement of volume of organs, tumors, lymph nodes, and pulmonary nodules using various imaging modalities. [8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15] Volume segmentation has specifically been used to accurately determine knee effusion volumes based on T2 MRI images with good interobserver reliability. 3,4 Similar technology has been used to determine intra-articular fluid volume of the first metatarsal phalangeal joint.…”