Gaussian Intensity Model with Neighborhood Cues for Fluid-Tissue Categorization of Multi-Sequence MR Brain Images

This work presents an automatic brain MRI segmentation method which can classify brain voxels into one of three main tissue types: gray matter (GM), white matter (WM) and Cerebro-spinal Fluid (CSF). Intensity-model based classification of MR images has proven problematic. The statistical approach does not carry any spatial, textural and neighborhood information in it. We propose to use a computationally fast and novel feature-set to facilitate voxel wise classification based on regional intensity, texture, spatial location of voxels in addition to posterior probability estimates. Information available through T1-weighted (T1), T1-weighted inversion recovery (IR) and T2-weighted FLAIR (FLAIR) MRI sequences was also leveraged. An aggregate overlap of 90.21% for all intracranial structures was reported between the automatic classification and available expert annotation as measured by the DICE coefficient.