Rayleigh segmentation of the endocardium in ultrasound images

In this paper we present the coupled active contours (CAC) model, which is applied to segmentation of the endocardium in ultrasonic images assuming Rayleigh distributed intensities. Comparative experiments, both real and synthetic, with a standard prior model are presented. In the CAC model the prior acts, by affine transformation, on the same image information as the active contour, in addition to the traditional interaction between prior and active contour. By this higher convergence rate and robustness, w.r.t artifacts and poor initialization, is achieved.