Segmentation and Boundary Detection of Fetal Kidney Images in Second and Third Trimesters Using Kernel-Based Fuzzy Clustering.

Organ segmentation is an important step in Ultrasound fetal images for early prediction of congenital abnormalities and to estimate delivery date. In many applications of 2D medical imaging, they face problems with speckle noise and object contours. Frequent scanning of fetal leads to clinical disturbances to the fetal growth and the quantitative interpretation of Ultrasonic images also a difficult task compared to other image modalities. In the present work a three-stage hybrid algorithm has been developed to segment the US fetal kidney images for the detection of shape and contour. At the first stage the hybrid Mean Median (Hybrid MM) filter is applied to reduce the speckle noise. Then a kernel based Fuzzy C - means clustering is used to detect the shape and contour. Finally, the texture features are obtained from the segmented images. Based on the obtained texture features, the abnormalities are detected. The Gaussian Radial basis function provides an accuracy of 80% at the second and third trimesters with weighted constant ranging from 4 to 8, compared to other global kernel functions. Similarly the proposed method has an accuracy of 86% with compared to other FCM techniques.