Learning a structured graphical model with boosted top-down features for ultrasound image segmentation.

A key problem for many medical image segmentation tasks is the combination of different-level knowledge. We propose a novel scheme of embedding detected regions into a superpixel based graphical model, by which we achieve a full leverage on various image cues for ultrasound lesion segmentation. Region features are mapped into a higher-dimensional space via a boosted model to become well controlled. Parameters for regions, superpixels and a new affinity term are learned simultaneously within the framework of structured learning. Experiments on a breast ultrasound image data set confirm the effectiveness of the proposed approach as well as our two novel modules.