Segmentation of medical images of different modalities using distance weighted C-V model

Region-based active contour model (ACM) has been extensively used in medical image segmentation and Chan & Vese's (C-V) model is one of the most popular ACM methods. We propose to incorporate into the C-V model a weighting function to take into consideration the fact that different locations in an image with differing distances from the active contour have differing importance in generating the segmentation result, thereby making it a weighted C-V (WC-V) model. The theoretical properties of the model and our experiments both demonstrate that the proposed WC-V model can significantly reduce the computational cost while improve the accuracy of segmentation over the results using the C-V model.