Segmentation of ischemic stroke lesions in multi-spectral MR images using weighting suppressed FCM and three phase level set

Abstract

Accurate segmentation of ischemic lesions is still a challenging task. In this paper, we propose a framework to extract ischemic lesions from multi-spectral MR images. In the proposed framework, MR images of each modality are first segmented into brain tissues and ischemic lesions by weighting suppressed fuzzy c-means. Preliminary lesion segmentation results are then fused among all the imaging modalities by majority voting. The fused segmentation results are finally refined by a three phase level set method. The level set formulation is defined on multi-spectral images with the capability of dealing with intensity inhomogeneities. The proposed framework has been applied to the MICCAI 2015 ISLES challenge. According to the ranking rules of the challenge, the proposed framework took the second place and the fourth place in sub-acute lesion segmentation and acute stroke estimation, respectively.