INTRACRANIAL CONTOUR EXTRACTION WITH ACTIVE CONTOUR MODELS

A novel image processing scheme for extracting the intracranial contou rs in axial magnetic resonance data sets is proposed. The scheme incor porates the method of active contour models, a recently introduced par adigm for contour extraction. Its performance is nearly ideal for T2-w eighted images. Although the performances for proton-density-weighted images and T1-weighted images drop slightly, qualitatively satisfactor y extraction still can be obtained for T1-weighted images. Due to high degree of automation, the scheme should help speed up some image proc essing applications that require the presegmentation of the intracrani al cavity.