Tissue Tracking: Applications for Brain MRI Classification

Abstract

©2007 SPIE--The International Society for Optical Engineering. One print or electronic copy may be made for personal use only. Systematic reproduction and distribution, duplication of any material in this paper for a fee or for commercial purposes, or modification of the content of the paper are prohibited. The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at: DOI Link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1117/12.710063Presented at Medical imaging 2007: Image processing, 18-20 February 2007, San Diego, California, USA.DOI:10.1117/12.710063Bayesian classification methods have been extensively used in a variety of image processing applications, including medical image analysis. The basic procedure is to combine data-driven knowledge in the likelihood terms with clinical knowledge in the prior terms to classify an image into a pre-determined number of classes. In many applications, it is difficult to construct meaningful priors and, hence, homogeneous priors are assumed. In this paper, we show how expectation-maximization weights and neighboring posterior probabilities may be combined to make intuitive use of the Bayesian priors. Drawing upon insights from computer vision tracking algorithms, we cast the problem in a tissue tracking framework. We show results of our algorithm on the classification of gray and white matter along with surrounding cerebral spinal fluid in brain MRI scans. We show results of our algorithm on 20 brain MRI datasets along with validation against expert manual segmentations