Needle Segmentation in US Images Based on Real-time Gray-scale Hough Transformation
基于实时灰度Hough变换的超声图像针状物体检测

Real-time needle segmentation and tracking are very important technique in image-guided surgery, biopsy, and therapy.We proposed a needle segmentation technique based on a Real-Time Gray-Scale Hough Transform (RTGHT), which is composed of an improved Gray Hough transformation using phase-grouping algorithm with the coarse-fine searching strategy.Furthermore, the RTGHT technique was evaluated by patient breast biopsy images.Experiments with patient breast biopsy ultrasound (US) image sequences showed that our approach can segment the biopsy needle in real time with the angular rms error of about 1° and the position rms error of about 0.5 mm on an affordable PC com-puter without the help of specially designed hardware.It can be applied in image-guided surgery and therapy.