Segmentation of focal brain lesions

Abstract

Focal brain lesions are a consequence of head trauma, cerebral infarcts or intracerebral hemorrhages. In clinical practice, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is commonly used to reveal them. The segmentation task consists of finding the lesion borders. This problem is non-trivial because the lesion may be connected to other intracranial compartments with similar intensities. A new method for the automatic segmentation of unilateral lesions is proposed here. The signal statistics of multichannel MR are examined w.r.t. the first-order mirror symmetry of the brain. The algorithm is discussed in detail, and its properties are evaluated on synthetic and real MRI data. © Springer-Verlag 2004.