RESUMEN
OBJECTIVE: To improve the precision of the traditional segmentation of echocardiogram, by suppressing the influence from inherent speckle noises in medical ultrasonic images. METHOD: An automatic segmentation method based on reconstructed morphology was proposed in this paper. First, the opening and closing operations by reconstruction were imposed to the ultrasonic image. Second, the top-hat operation was used to extract the bright and/or dark features and to find out the boundaries corresponding to these features, whereby implemented the automatic segmentation. RESULT: The segmented echocardiogram had less artificial boundaries resulted from speckle noise, and could accurately be extracted the artery and ventricle. CONCLUSION: The presented method can detect both dark and bright objects accurately, and the boundary has a fine continuity. In addition, the algorithm is also applicable to the extraction of sole bright/dark features, accordingly to reduce the complexity and time needed and to improve the accuracy.