An efficient brain magnetic resonance image segmentation method

BackgroundSegmenting the hippocampal subfields accurately from brain magnetic resonance (MR) images is a challenging task in medical image analysis. Due to the small structural size and the morphological complexity of the hippocampal subfields, the traditional segmentation methods are hard to obtain the ideal segmentation result.MethodsIn this paper, we proposed a hippocampal subfields segmentation method using generative adversarial networks. The proposed method can achieve the pixel-level classification of brain MR images by building an UG-net model and an adversarial model and training the two models against each other alternately. UG-net extracts local information and retains the interrelationship features between pixels. Moreover, the adversarial training implements spatial consistency among the generated class labels and smoothens the edges of class labels on segmented region.ResultsThe evaluation has performed on the dataset obtained from center for imaging of neurodegenerative diseases (CIND) for CA1, CA2, DG, CA3, Head, Tail, SUB, ERC and PHG in hippocampal subfields, resulting in the dice similarity coefficient (DSC) of 0.919, 0.648, 0.903, 0.673, 0.929, 0.913, 0.906, 0.884 and 0.889 respectively. For the large subfields, such as Head and CA1 of hippocampus, the DSC was increased by 3.9% and 9.03% than state-of-the-art approaches, while for the smaller subfields, such as ERC and PHG, the segmentation accuracy was significantly increased 20.93% and 16.30% respectively.ConclusionThe results show the improvement in performance of the proposed method, compared with other methods, which include approaches based on multi-atlas, hierarchical multi-atlas, dictionary learning and sparse representation and CNN. In implementation, the proposed method provides better results in hippocampal subfields segmentation.

The brain is considered a main important part of human body as it participate to control all the activities of human. Under some unhealthy conditions the abnormal and uncontrolled growth of tissue may take place which is unnatural process. This kind of process taking place in human brain is referred as “brain tumor”. The brain tumor may be of cancerous (malignant) or may be of non-cancerous (Benign) and its detection is a very much important to reduced the death rate of humans suffering from tumor. The detection of brain tumor can be performed by using various image processing techniques like brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), Computed Tomography (CT), Electroencephalography (EEG), Positron Emission Tomography (PET), Magneto Encephalography (MEG) etc. Among these techniques the brain MRI is widely adopted in the world due to its significant features. But to detect tumor in the brain MRI, the processes like preprocessing, segmentation and classification are must. This paper deals with the various aspects of the brain tumor detection. The paper discusses the significant researches which are meant for brain tumor detection through MRI quality enhancement, MRI segmentation and MRI classification (as cancerous or not). The outcome of the paper discussed that there were no proper researches are performed to detect the brain tumor, focused on good quality of image, less researches on segmentation and classification of brain tumor. Finally the paper gives the future research scope to overcome the addressed research gap.

Accurate classification and quantification of brain tissues is important for monitoring disease progression, measurement of atrophy, and correlating magnetic resonance (MR) measures with clinical disability. Classification of MR brain images in the presence of lesions, such as multiple sclerosis (MS), is particularly challenging. Images obtained with lower resolution often suffer from partial volume averaging leading to false classifications. While partial volume averaging can be reduced by acquiring volumetric images at high resolution, image segmentation and quantification can be technically challenging. In this study, we integrated the brain anatomical knowledge with non-parametric and parametric statistical classifiers for automatically classifying tissues and lesions on high resolution multichannel three-dimensional images acquired on 60 MS brains. The results of automatic lesion segmentation were reviewed by the expert. The agreement between results obtained by the automated analysis and the expert was excellent as assessed by the quantitative metrics, low absolute volume difference percent (36.18 ± 34.90), low average symmetric surface distance (1.64 mm ± 1.30 mm), high true positive rate (84.75 ± 12.69), and low false positive rate (34.10 ± 16.00). The segmented results were also in close agreement with the corrected results as assessed by Bland–Altman and regression analyses. Finally, our lesion segmentation was validated using the MS lesion segmentation grand challenge dataset (MICCAI 2008).

Automatic segmentation of Magnetic Resonance Images (MRI) for tissue classification becomes more challenging when the image is corrupted with noise and intensity non-uniformity (INU). Several fuzzy clustering based statistical retrospective methods exist for simultaneous correction and segmentation of images but most of them fail to be robust in presence of noise, outliers and INU artifacts. In this paper, a hybridization of rough c-means and spatial fuzzy c-means clustering is presented whose objective function has been modified to accommodate INU field as well. While the membership function of fuzzy sets enables efficient handling of overlapping partitions, the concept of lower and upper approximations of rough sets deals with uncertainty, vagueness, and incompleteness in class definition. The experiments conducted on brain MR images show promising results in terms of segmentation accuracy and class separability. The usefulness of proposed algorithm is also investigated on high field MR images. The proposed algorithm Rough-Theoretic Bias-Corrected Fuzzy C-Means Algorithm (R-BCFCM) has significant performance improvement over other similar methods from rough-fuzzy family and can be employed for MRI corrupted with high intensity non-uniformity and noise.

A local Zernike moment-based unbiased nonlocal means fuzzy C-Means algorithm for segmentation of brain magnetic resonance images

An automatic segmentation method of hippo-campus for volume measurement in MR brain images by using sparse patch representation and discriminative dictionary learning is proposed in this paper, which can overcome the limitation of multi-atlas approaches that mostly rely on similarity between target image and atlases for more accurate segmentation. In the proposed method, atlases are registered to a target image, then patch-based features including intensity and gradient are extracted from registered atlases for a dictionary learning model, from which dictionaries and classifiers are learned simultaneously. The label for voxels in the target image is determined via solving sparse representation of target patch over learned dictionary. Performance of the proposed method is evaluated on 30 subjects from the public dataset CIND by cross validation. Qualitative and quantitative comparisons illustrate that the proposed method is competitive compared with state-of-the-art approaches based on multi-atlas.

In this paper, a novel approach has been proposed to register noisy brain multimodal images. Specifically, we have considered CT and MR images. The MR image is the noisy one that has been considered to be the floating image while CT image is the fixed one. The joint histogram of the CT and noisy MR image has been modeled as Markov Random Field (MRF). Every element of the joint histogram has been estimated using the Maximum a Posterior (MAP) estimation criterion. The MAP estimates have been obtained jointly by Simulated Annealing (SA) and Iterative Conditioned Mode (ICM) algorithms. This estimated joint histogram has been used to compute the mutual information for different values of the registration parameter. The registration parameter has been estimated with 99 percent confidence interval. The proposed scheme has been successfully tested with different noise conditions and has been compared with five existing methods.

We propose a multimodal perceptron tree (MMPT) neural network to segment magnetic resonance (MR) images. The architecture consists of simple networks-neurons, hierarchically connected in a tree structure. The latter is built up during training by the adopted depth-first searching technique augmented with choosing the best hyperplane split of the feature subspace at each tree node. This neural network effectively partitions the feature space into subregions and each terminal subregion is assigned to a class label depending on the data routed to it. As the tree grows, the number of training data for each node decreases, which results in less weight update epochs and decreases the time consumption. The MMPT performance is compared to that of a multilayered perceptron (MLP). The networks are applied to brain MR image segmentation into gray matter/white matter regions.

Hidden Markov random field model based brain MR image segmentation using clonal selection algorithm and Markov chain Monte Carlo method

The hidden Markov random field (HMRF) model is an efficient method for image segmentation. However, it may not accurately segment a poorly defined image like Magnetic Resonance (MR) brain image. The HMRF model uses an initial estimation for tissue segmentation of MR brain image. The initial estimation of an input image has a large role to play to obtain a robust HMRF model. In general, a hard clustering method is used for initial estimation. However, it is not an efficient technique for the segmentation of a complex and irregular shape image like MR brain image. The method of clustering acts as a preprocessing step in improving the performance of HMRF. It aims at producing a set of concise data in the segmentation of brain tissues. In this paper, we propose a new approach to HMRF model, which incorporates the fuzzy C-means (FCM) clustering for the initial estimation of the brain image, which is not found in the literature. This results in efficient segmentation of brain tissues. The results are compared with the spatial FCM clustering algorithm and HMRF model with K-means clustering, using different segmentation evaluation indices. It is seen that the results are better than the other methods.

Image segmentation method combined with Markov random field (MRF) model and regional growth image in this paper is proposed to achieve the accuracy of sonar image segmentation. First of all, the characteristics of field and the label field of sonar image is established through the MRF model; secondly, the further image segmentation is processed by region growing based on the initial image segmentation by ICM algorithm, and this reduced segmentation plaques caused by the MRF method on image segmentation. Finally, experimental results show that the method in this paper can obtain the image segmentation effectively.

Brain stroke is the major second leading cause of death for the people above the age of 60 and fifth leading cause in people aged 15–59. Automatic ischemic stroke lesion segmentation of Magnetic Resonance Images (MRI) is an important task since manual identification by medical experts is time-consuming. In this work, the Diffusion Weighted (DW) brain MR images of ISLES 2015 challenge dataset and Radiopaedia are pre-processed based on hybrid contrast enhancement and filtering technique. The skull is stripped by thresholding techniques along with mathematical morphology procedure. Later the identification of ischemic stroke lesion is performed by maximum entropy-based and Fuzzy C Means (FCM) thresholding. The segmented results are compared with expert’s ground truth and the performance is analyzed by means of similarity indices. It is observed that FCM performs better in identifying multiple and minute stroke lesion in MR images. There is nearly 98% close match between FCM segmented results and the ground truth scribed by the experts. Thus the proposed automated work flow helps in assisting the clinicians to identify the ischemic stroke lesion in DW modality of brain MR images.

We propose a novel approach to investigate and implement unsupervised image content understanding and segmentation of color industrial images like medical imaging, forensic imaging, security and surveillance imaging, biotechnical imaging, biometrics, mineral and mining imaging, material science imaging, and many more. In this particular work, our focus will be on medical images only. The aim is to develop a computer aided diagnosis (CAD) system based on a newly developed Multidimensional Spatially Variant Finite Mixture Model (MSVFMM) using Markov Random Fields (MRF) Model. Unsupervised means automatic discovery of classes or clusters in images rather than generating the class or cluster descriptions from training image sets. The aim of this work is to produce precise segmentation of color medical images on the basis of subtle color and texture variation. Finer segmentation of images has tremendous potential in medical imaging where subtle information related to color and texture is required to analyze the image accurately. In this particular work, we have used CIE-Luv and Daubechies wavelet transforms as color and texture descriptors respectively. Using the combined effect of a CIE-Luv color model and Daubechies transforms, we can segment color medical images precisely in a meaningful manner. The evaluation of the results is done through comparison of the segmentation quality with another similar alternative approach and it is found that the proposed approach is capable of producing more faithful segmentation.

991012554269003412 HKUST Electronic Theses Label inference for atlas-based sub-cortical structure segmentation in brain magnetic resonance images by Siqi Bao thesis 2017 xiv, 113 pages : illustrations ; 30 cm The human brain is a complex neural system composed of several…Read more ›

Accurate and efficient diagnosis in a short time period is an important part of brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) classification. In this paper, we use multi-cluster feature selection (MCFS) method to select efficient features from the primary features for brain MRI classification. The primary features are obtained from a three-level two-dimensional discrete wavelet transform (2D DWT). The selected features are then applied to the K-nearest neighbor (KNN) classifier. We classify the MRI as normal or one of the seven different diseases. The results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves higher accuracy than the other methods in distinguishing different types of disease.