Modified fast marching method and its application in the segmentation of medical images

One of the most popular level set algorithms is the so-called fast marching method. In this paper, a medical image segmentation method is proposed based on the combination of fast marching method and watershed transformation. First, the original image is smoothed using nonlinear diffusion filter, then the smoothed image is over-segmented by the watershed algorithm. Last, the image is segmented automatically using the modified fast marching method. Due to introducing over-segmentation, the arrival time the seeded point to the boundary of region should be calculated. For other pixels inside the region of the seeded point, the arrival time is not calculated because of the region homogeneity. So the algorithm's speed improves greatly. Moreover, the speed function is defined again based on the statistical similarity degree of the nearby regions. Experiments show that the algorithm can fast and accurately obtain segmentation results of medical images.