Skull Stripping Using Geodesic Active Contours in Magnetic Resonance Images

Abstract

Skull stripping is an important image processing step in many neuroimaging studies. In this paper, a novel scheme based on a level sets representation of the geodesic active contour (GAC) is employed to detect the boundary of the skull. This approach is based on the relation between active contours and the computation of geodesics (minimal length curves). The contour is evolved from inside the MR image under the influence of geometric measures of the MR image. Before the application of GAC, the MR image is roughly done into two regions, brain and nonbrain. The centroid of the brain region is obtained which is used for drawing an ellipse situated well inside the brain region. This ellipse is the initial contour. After the model converges to a stable solution, the obtained mask is processed using morphological operators. This mask is then used to give the final segmented output.

A Survey of MRI Segmentation Techniques for Brain Tumor Studies

“…Another approach to segment brain tissues from non-brain tissues is by finding several contour regions within the brain region extracted from a preliminary segmentation [32]. Starting from an initial contour, it evolves and expands the curve and repeatedly finds all the pixels within the specified contour until a final image mask showcasing the brain region is developed.…”

Robust Skull-Stripping Segmentation Based on Irrational Mask for Magnetic Resonance Brain Images

“…Seghier et al [6] developed a method for micro-bleed detection using a unified automated segmentation-normalization technique that includes an optimization step (i.e., the morphological operations were used to clean up the brain image on the tissues as skull and other tissues characterized by low intensities around the brain and the scalp), and the results were compared with a visual rating system. During the course of evolution, a variety of techniques such as graph cut [11], watershed algorithm [12,13], histogram analysis [14], multi-atlas skull stripping (MASS) [15], thresholding and morphological reconstruction [16], and active contour model [17,18] were proposed.…”