Patent ID: 7720268

Claim:
A method of segmenting a digitized ultrasound image comprising the steps of: providing a digitized in-phase/quadrature (IQ) ultrasound image comprising a plurality of intensity data values defined on a N-dimensional grid of points; decorrelating said ultrasound image wherein spatial correlations are removed in said intensity data; modeling said decorrelated image intensities with a statistical distribution; propagating an active contour in said image by initializing a contour to a closed hypercurve that divides the image into two regions, determining for each region a statistical distribution that maximizes a likelihood function of said distribution in each said region, and propagating said contour in a normal direction using an Euler-Lagrange equation derived from said likelihood function, wherein said contour is a level set of a scalar function whose values are negative in one region and positive in the other region, wherein said contour segments said image, wherein said statistical distribution is a Fisher-Tippet distribution, and wherein said likelihood function includes the terms ∫ Ω (ln2+2 l ( {right arrow over (x)} )−ln σ i 2 −exp(2 l ( {right arrow over (x)} )−ln σ i 2 )) {right arrow over (d)}x ∫ Ω o (ln2+2 l ( {right arrow over (x)} )−ln σ o 2 −exp(2 l ( {right arrow over (x)} )−ln σ o 2 )){right arrow over (d)}x wherein l({right arrow over (x)}) is the image intensity for point ({right arrow over (x)}), i and o denote regions inside and outside the contour, respectively, and σ i and σ o are the Fisher-Tippett parameters inside regions Ω i and Ω o .