A fast morphological reconstruction algorithm for MRI brain image simplification

Abstract

The MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) brain image simplification has become one of important pre-processing steps for medical researches and clinical applications. Usually, the fast hybrid reconstruction algorithm, one of the common algorithms of image simplification, requires multiple iterations of reconstruction, so the time complexity is high. In 2004, Robinson gave a downhill filter to overcome this shortage, but it usually remains brighter regions because this algorithm targets MRCP (Magnetic Resonance Cholangiopancreatography) data. In response to the characteristics of MRI brain image simplification, this paper proposes a fast morphological reconstruction algorithm. Firstly, regional maxima concept is introduced to modify the initialization condition, then improved downhill filter algorithm is applied to reconstruct image. Experimental results show that the mean reduction of the execution time is about 73.68% compared to the fast hybrid reconstruction algorithm, and it can achieve good result when it is used to the contour extraction from the MRI brain image. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.