Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) disorder is identified by the presence of a number of follicles present in the ovary of female reproductive system. Ultrasound imaging of the ovary contains essential information about the size, number of follicles and its position. In real time, the detection of PCOS is a difficult task for radiologists due to the various sizes of follicles and is highly connected with blood vessels and tissues. This often results in error diagnosis. For preprocessing various standard filtering techniques are applied on ovary image. Based on the performance, appropriate filter is chosen to remove the noise from the image. This paper presents an effectual active contour with modified Otsu threshold value to automated discovery of follicles from the ultrasound images. The performances of the proposed method illustrate the betterments of the proposed approach over other techniques. © 2019, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.