Bj. Erickson et Rtv. Avula, AN ALGORITHM FOR AUTOMATIC SEGMENTATION AND CLASSIFICATION OF MAGNETIC-RESONANCE BRAIN IMAGES, Journal of digital imaging, 11(2), 1998, pp. 74-82
In this article, we describe the development and validation of an auto
matic algorithm to segment brain from extracranial tissues, and to cla
ssify intracranial tissues as cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), gray matter (
GM), white matter (WM) or pathology. T1 weighted spin echo, dual echo
fast spin echo (T2 weighted and proton density (PD) weighted images) a
nd fast Fluid Attenuated Inversion Recovery (FLAIR) magnetic resonance
(MR) images were acquired in 100 normal patients and 9 multiple scler
osis (MS) patients. One of the normal studies had synthesized MS-like
lesions superimposed. This allowed precise measurement of the accuracy
of the classification. The 9 MS patients were imaged twice in one wee
k. The algorithm was applied to these data sets to measure reproducibi
lity. The accuracy was measured based on the synthetic lesion images,
where the true voxel class was known. Ninety-six percent of normal int
radural tissue voxels (GM, WM, and CSF) were labeled correctly, and 94
% of pathological tissues were labeled correctly. A low coefficient of
variation (COV) was found (mean, 4.1%) for measurement of brain tissu
es and pathology when comparing MRI scans on the 9 patients. A totally
automatic segmentation algorithm has been described which accurately
and reproducibly segments and classifies intradural tissues based on b
oth synthetic and actual images. Copyright (C) 1998 by W.B. Saunders C
ompany.