Sequential application of viscous opening and lower leveling for three-dimensional brain extraction on magnetic resonance imaging T1

Abstract

A composition of the viscous opening and the lower leveling is introduced to extract brain in magnetic resonance imaging T1. The innovative transformation disconnects chained components and has better control on the reconstruction process of the marker inside of the original image. However, the sequential operator requires setting several parameters, making its application difficult. Due to this situation, a simplification is carried out on it to obtain a more practical method. The proposed morphological transformations were tested with the Internet Brain Segmentation Repository (IBSR) database, which is used as a benchmark among the community. The results are compared using the Jaccard and Dice indices with respect to (i) manual segmentations obtained from the IBSR, (ii) mean indices reported in the current literature, and (iii) segmentations obtained from the Brain Extraction Tool, since this is one of the most popular algorithms used for brain segmentation. The average indices of Jaccard and Dice indicate that the reduced transformation produces similar results to the other methods reported in the literature while the sequential operator presents a better performance. © The Authors.