An open-source GUI application for segment foetal ultrasound images

Abstract

There are several commercial software for medical image dataset segmentation. However, most of them are expensive and not user-friendly. With our proposal of a new open-source software with a simple and specific graphical user interface (GUI), it is easy to segment a foetus from a 3D ultrasound medical image dataset. The segmented portion of images can be converted into a stereolithography (STL) file format for 3D print technologies in order to obtain an accurate physical reproduction of the model segmented. Despite the large number of segmentation algorithms available, this new GUI has three specific possibilities (threshold, region growing and Chan-Vese) in order to keep it simple and efficient. For the same reason, the GUI has just three noise filters available in order to reduce speckle. Besides GUI simplicity, a good segmentation quality was achieved. The main purpose of our proposal is to segment foetal 3D ultrasound images and to make this task quick, easy and efficient.