Interactive ellipse fitting in ultrasound images

Segmentation tools have to take into account the technical characteristics of the machine on which they are supported and, of course, the users needs. These tools have to be robust, ergonomic and also need to be fast enough. An ellipse fitting method in ultrasound images is presented in this paper. It makes use the Pascal´s theorem and permits the ellipse reconstruction using only 3 points from its contour by the estimation of tangents using the Hough transform. A refining module using genetic algorithm will also be introduced. Preliminary results on different organ segmentation are presented and discussed.