Brain extraction using geodesic active contours

Albert Huang; Rafeef Abugharbieh; Roger Tam; Anthony Traboulsee

doi:10.1117/12.654160

15 March 2006 Brain extraction using geodesic active contours

Albert Huang, Rafeef Abugharbieh, Roger Tam, Anthony Traboulsee

Proceedings Volume 6144, Medical Imaging 2006: Image Processing; 61444J (2006) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.654160
Event: Medical Imaging, 2006, San Diego, California, United States

Abstract

Extracting the brain cortex from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) head scans is an essential preprocessing step of which the accuracy greatly affects subsequent image analysis. The currently popular Brain Extraction Tool (BET) produces a brain mask which may be too smooth for practical use. This paper presents a novel brain extraction tool based on three-dimensional geodesic active contours, connected component analysis and mathematical morphology. Based on user-specified intensity and contrast levels, the proposed algorithm allows an active contour to evolve naturally and extract the brain cortex. Experiments on synthetic MRI data and scanned coronal and axial MRI image volumes indicate successful extraction of tight perimeters surrounding the brain cortex. Quantitative evaluations on both synthetic phantoms and manually labeled data resulted in better accuracy than BET in terms of true and false voxel assignment. Based on these results, we illustrate that our brain extraction tool is a robust and accurate approach for the challenging task of automatically extracting the brain cortex in MRI data.

Citation Download Citation

Albert Huang, Rafeef Abugharbieh, Roger Tam, and Anthony Traboulsee "Brain extraction using geodesic active contours", Proc. SPIE 6144, Medical Imaging 2006: Image Processing, 61444J (15 March 2006); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.654160

ACCESS THE FULL ARTICLE

INSTITUTIONAL
Select your institution to access the SPIE Digital Library.

SELECT YOUR INSTITUTION

PERSONAL
Sign in with your SPIE account to access your personal subscriptions or to use specific features such as save to my library, sign up for alerts, save searches, etc.

PERSONAL SIGN IN

No SPIE Account? Create one

PURCHASE THIS CONTENT

SUBSCRIBE TO DIGITAL LIBRARY

50 downloads per 1-year subscription

Members: $195

Non-members: $335 ADD TO CART

25 downloads per 1 - year subscription

Members: $145

Non-members: $250 ADD TO CART

PURCHASE SINGLE ARTICLE

Includes PDF, HTML & Video, when available