1 research outputs found
Automated Detection of Regions of Interest for Brain Perfusion MR Images
Images with abnormal brain anatomy produce problems for automatic
segmentation techniques, and as a result poor ROI detection affects both
quantitative measurements and visual assessment of perfusion data. This paper
presents a new approach for fully automated and relatively accurate ROI
detection from dynamic susceptibility contrast perfusion magnetic resonance and
can therefore be applied excellently in the perfusion analysis. In the proposed
approach the segmentation output is a binary mask of perfusion ROI that has
zero values for air pixels, pixels that represent non-brain tissues, and
cerebrospinal fluid pixels. The process of binary mask producing starts with
extracting low intensity pixels by thresholding. Optimal low-threshold value is
solved by obtaining intensity pixels information from the approximate
anatomical brain location. Holes filling algorithm and binary region growing
algorithm are used to remove falsely detected regions and produce region of
only brain tissues. Further, CSF pixels extraction is provided by thresholding
of high intensity pixels from region of only brain tissues. Each time-point
image of the perfusion sequence is used for adjustment of CSF pixels location.
The segmentation results were compared with the manual segmentation performed
by experienced radiologists, considered as the reference standard for
evaluation of proposed approach. On average of 120 images the segmentation
results have a good agreement with the reference standard. All detected
perfusion ROIs were deemed by two experienced radiologists as satisfactory
enough for clinical use. The results show that proposed approach is suitable to
be used for perfusion ROI detection from DSC head scans. Segmentation tool
based on the proposed approach can be implemented as a part of any automatic
brain image processing system for clinical use