Computer Aided Automatic Brain Segmentation from Computed Tomography Images using Multilevel Masking
Importance of computed tomography (CT) images lies in imaging speed, image contrast & resolution and clinical cost. It has found wide use in detection and diagnosis of brain diseases. Unfortunately reported works on CT segmentation is not very significant. In this paper the gaps in automatic brain segmentation are identified and addressed with possible solutions which results into a robust, automatic computer aided diagnosis (CAD) system. Adaptive thresholding, automatic seed point finding, knowledge driven region growing and multilevel masking are key potentials of this work. Two types of masks are created. One mask is used to segment brain matter and another one restricts inclusion of non-intracranial area of nasal image slices. This second mask is a global reference mask for all slices in a dataset whereas the brain intensity mask is implemented on adjacent slices and automatically updated for next slice. Mask propagates independently in two different directions keeping reference slice at centre. Successive propagation and adaptive modification of brain mask have demonstrated very high potential in brain segmentation. Presented result shows highest sensitivity i.e. 1 and more than 96 segmented images can be used for any brain disease diagnosis or further image analysis as no information within brain is altered or removed.
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