User-guided segmentation for medical image using belief propagation

Medical image processing is considered on an important elements and image segmentation is still a challenging area. Recently, researches for the CT or MRI images are in progress to measure the degree of fatty degeneration; and the size of muscle rupture. However, the segmentation of the medical image is not easy because of irregularity of muscle shape, noises of the MRI or CT image and unclear boundary features. In this paper, we propose a segmentation method using the active contour with the belief Propagation to overcome the local energy minima problem occurred on the Snake or active contour method. Moreover, the proposed method detects the optimum boundary using the semi-automatic method with the user-guided model and it increase the user convenience and computational efficiency.