Automated tissue segmentation of MR brain images in the presence of white matter lesions.
Over the last few years, the increasing interest in brain tissue volume measurements on clinical settings has led to the development of a wide number of automated tissue segmentation methods. However, white matter lesions are known to reduce the performance of automated tissue segmentation methods, which requires manual annotation of the lesions and refilling them before segmentation, which is tedious and time-consuming. Here, we propose a new, fully automated T1-w/FLAIR tissue segmentation approach designed to deal with images in the presence of WM lesions. This approach integrates a robust partial volume tissue segmentation with WM outlier rejection and filling, combining intensity and probabilistic and morphological prior maps. We evaluate the performance of this method on the MRBrainS13 tissue segmentation challenge database, which contains images with vascular WM lesions, and also on a set of Multiple Sclerosis (MS) patient images. On both databases, we validate the performance of our method with other state-of-the-art techniques. On the MRBrainS13 data, the presented approach was at the time of submission the best ranked unsupervised intensity model method of the challenge (7th position) and clearly outperformed the other unsupervised pipelines such as FAST and SPM12. On MS data, the differences in tissue segmentation between the images segmented with our method and the same images where manual expert annotations were used to refill lesions on T1-w images before segmentation were lower or similar to the best state-of-the-art pipeline incorporating automated lesion segmentation and filling. Our results show that the proposed pipeline achieved very competitive results on both vascular and MS lesions. A public version of this approach is available to download for the neuro-imaging community.
Research institute of Computer Vision and Robotics, University of Girona, Ed. P-IV, Campus Montilivi, 17071 Girona, Spain. Electronic address: svalverde@eia.udg.edu.
Sergi
S
Valverde
Research institute of Computer Vision and Robotics, University of Girona, Ed. P-IV, Campus Montilivi, 17071 Girona, Spain.
Arnau
A
Oliver
Research institute of Computer Vision and Robotics, University of Girona, Ed. P-IV, Campus Montilivi, 17071 Girona, Spain.
Eloy
E
Roura
Research institute of Computer Vision and Robotics, University of Girona, Ed. P-IV, Campus Montilivi, 17071 Girona, Spain.
Sandra
S
González-Villà
Magnetic Resonance Unit, Dept of Radiology, Vall d'Hebron University Hospital, Spain.
Deborah
D
Pareto
Girona Magnetic Resonance Center, Spain.
Joan C
JC
Vilanova
Multiple Sclerosis and Neuroimmunology Unit, Dr. Josep Trueta University Hospital, Spain.
Lluís
L
Ramió-Torrentà
Magnetic Resonance Unit, Dept of Radiology, Vall d'Hebron University Hospital, Spain.
Àlex
À
Rovira
Research institute of Computer Vision and Robotics, University of Girona, Ed. P-IV, Campus Montilivi, 17071 Girona, Spain.
Xavier
X
Lladó
D000465:Algorithms; D001331:Automation / Q000379:methods*; D001921:Brain / Q000473:pathology*; D006801:Humans; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging / Q000379:methods*; D009103:Multiple Sclerosis / Q000473:pathology; D066127:White Matter / Q000473:pathology*
Automatic tissue segmentation; Brain; MRI; Multiple sclerosis