title: Computer-assisted delineation of cerebral infarct from diffusion-weighted MRI using Gaussian mixture model.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  Diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) is a widely used medical imaging modality for diagnosis and monitoring of cerebral stroke. The identification of exact location of stroke lesion helps in perceiving its characteristics, an essential part of diagnosis and treatment planning. This task is challenging due to the typical shape of the stroke lesion. This paper proposes an efficient method for computer-aided delineation of stroke lesions from DWI images.
  
  
  METHODS
  Proposed methodology comprises of three steps. At the initial step, image contrast has been improved by applying fuzzy intensifier leading to the better visual quality of the stroke lesion. In the following step, a two-class (stroke lesion area vs. non-stroke lesion area) segmentation technique based on Gaussian mixture model has been designed for the localization of stroke lesion. To eliminate the artifacts which would appear during segmentation process, a binary morphological post-processing through area operator has been defined for exact delineation of the lesion area.
  
  
  RESULTS
  The performance of the proposed methodology has been compared with the manually delineated images (ground truth) obtained from different experts, individually. Quantitative evaluation with respect to various performance measures (such as dice coefficient, Jaccard score, and correlation coefficient) shows the efficient performance of the proposed technique.
authors.affiliation: School of Medical Science and Technology, IIT Kharagpur, Kharagpur, WB, 721302, India.
authors.forename: Manas Kumar
authors.initials: MK
authors.lastname: Nag
authors.affiliation: School of Medical Science and Technology, IIT Kharagpur, Kharagpur, WB, 721302, India.
authors.forename: Subhranil
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Koley
authors.affiliation: Advanced Technology Development Centre, IIT Kharagpur, Kharagpur, WB, 721302, India.
authors.forename: Debarghya
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: China
authors.affiliation: EKO CT and MRI Scan Centre, Medical College and Hospitals Campus, Kolkata, WB, 700082, India.
authors.forename: Anup Kumar
authors.initials: AK
authors.lastname: Sadhu
authors.affiliation: Apollo Multispecialty Hospital, Chennai, TN, 600035, India.
authors.forename: Ravikanth
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Balaji
authors.affiliation: Apollo Multispecialty Hospital, Chennai, TN, 600035, India.
authors.forename: Siddharth
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Ghosh
authors.affiliation: School of Medical Science and Technology, IIT Kharagpur, Kharagpur, WB, 721302, India. chandanc@smst.iitkgp.ernet.in.
authors.forename: Chandan
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Chakraborty
mesh_terms: D016208:Databases, Factual; D038524:Diffusion Magnetic Resonance Imaging / Q000379:methods*; D006801:Humans; D007091:Image Processing, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods*; D020521:Stroke / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging*
keywords: DWI; Fuzzy contrast enhancement; Gaussian mixture model; Segmentation; Stroke lesion