COMPUTERIZED PROSTATE BOUNDARY ESTIMATION OF ULTRASOUND IMAGES USING RADIAL BAS-RELIEF METHOD

A new method is presented for automatic prostate boundary detection in ultrasound images taken transurethrally or transrectally. This is one of the stages in the implementation of a robotic procedure for prosta te surgery performed by a robot known as the robot for urology (UROBOT ). Unlike most edge detection methods, which detect object edges by me ans of either a spatial filter (such as Sobel, Laplacian or something of that nature) or a texture descriptor (local signal-to-noise ratio, joint probability density function etc.), this new approach employs a technique called radial bas-relief (RBR) to outline the prostate bound ary area automatically. The results show that the RBR method works wel l in the detection of the prostate boundary in ultrasound images. It c an also be useful for boundary detection problems in medical images wh ere the object boundary is hard to detect using traditional edge detec tion algorithms, such as ultrasound of the uterus and kidney.