Generalized method for partial volume estimation and tissue segmentation in cerebral magnetic resonance images

April Khademi; Anastasios Venetsanopoulos; Alan R. Moody

doi:10.1117/1.JMI.1.1.014002

23 April 2014 Generalized method for partial volume estimation and tissue segmentation in cerebral magnetic resonance images

April Khademi, Anastasios Venetsanopoulos, Alan R. Moody

Author Affiliations +

Journal of Medical Imaging, Vol. 1, Issue 1, 014002 (April 2014). https://doi.org/10.1117/1.JMI.1.1.014002

Abstract

An artifact found in magnetic resonance images (MRI) called partial volume averaging (PVA) has received much attention since accurate segmentation of cerebral anatomy and pathology is impeded by this artifact. Traditional neurological segmentation techniques rely on Gaussian mixture models to handle noise and PVA, or high-dimensional feature sets that exploit redundancy in multispectral datasets. Unfortunately, model-based techniques may not be optimal for images with non-Gaussian noise distributions and/or pathology, and multispectral techniques model probabilities instead of the partial volume (PV) fraction. For robust segmentation, a PV fraction estimation approach is developed for cerebral MRI that does not depend on predetermined intensity distribution models or multispectral scans. Instead, the PV fraction is estimated directly from each image using an adaptively defined global edge map constructed by exploiting a relationship between edge content and PVA. The final PVA map is used to segment anatomy and pathology with subvoxel accuracy. Validation on simulated and real, pathology-free T1 MRI (Gaussian noise), as well as pathological fluid attenuation inversion recovery MRI (non-Gaussian noise), demonstrate that the PV fraction is accurately estimated and the resultant segmentation is robust. Comparison to model-based methods further highlight the benefits of the current approach.

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April Khademi, Anastasios Venetsanopoulos, and Alan R. Moody "Generalized method for partial volume estimation and tissue segmentation in cerebral magnetic resonance images," Journal of Medical Imaging 1(1), 014002 (23 April 2014). https://doi.org/10.1117/1.JMI.1.1.014002

Published: 23 April 2014

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