A new segmentation method based on SVM for HIFU image-guided system

High Intensity Focused Ultrasound (HIFU) is one of promising non-invasive thermal ablation techniques of tumor. In this paper, we present a segmentation method based on Support Vector Machine (SVM) for HIFU image-guided system where SVM is used to construct the prior model about the intensity and the shape of the structure from the training set of images and the boundaries. When segmenting a novel image, we improved level set method by incorporating this prior model. Segmentation results are demonstrated on ultrasonic images. It shows that the prior model makes segmentation process more robust and faster.