A Multi-Level Thresholding Method based on Histogram Derivatives for Accurate Brain MRI Segmentation

• Pérez, María Gabriela ^[1] ; Sanchez Calle, Angel ^[2] ; Moreno, Ana Belen ^[2] ; Nunes, Eldman ; Andaluz, Víctor
  1. [1] Universidad Técnica de Ambato

     Universidad Técnica de Ambato

     Ambato, Ecuador

     
  2. [2] Universidad Rey Juan Carlos

     Universidad Rey Juan Carlos

     Madrid, España

     
• Localización: Revista Politécnica, ISSN-e 2477-8990, Vol. 35, Nº. 2, 2015 (Ejemplar dedicado a: Revista Politécnica), págs. 82-82
• Idioma: inglés
• Enlaces
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• Resumen

  • Resumen: Este trabajo describe la implementación y evaluación cuantitativa de un método automático para la segmentación precisa de imágenes cerebrales de resonancia magnética (RM). El método se basa en la umbralización adaptativa multinivel del histograma de la imagen con el fin de clasificarla en un número variable de clases de tejidos cerebrales. Inicialmente, se realiza una etapa de preproceso para eliminación de ruido y realzado de la imagen. Después, se calcula el histograma de la imagen que es suavizado usando un filtro piramidal. La derivada de dicho histograma se usa para determinar una lista de picos y valles en la correspondiente función. El número de clases de tejidos cerebrales a segmentar se corresponde al número de umbrales buscados en el histograma más uno, y dichos umbrales se determinan usando los valores los valles de la función derivada que minimizan los errores en la clasificación de los píxeles de la imagen. El método propuesto se usó para segmentar cuatro clases de tejidos en las imágenes cerebrales (materia blanca, materia gris, líquido cefalorraquídeo y fondo, respectivamente) correspondientes a un conjunto de imágenes sintéticas de resonancia magnética cerebral obtenidas usando la base de datos BrainWeb. El método propuesto se comparó con otros dos métodos de segmentación implementados: el primero basado en modelos de mezcla de gaussianas y el segundo basado en el algoritmo de las k medias. Nuestra propuesta produjo resultados de clasificación correcta por encima del 95%, que son equivalentes a los de los algoritmos comparados. Abstract: This work describes the implementation and quantitative evaluation of an automatic and accurate brain magnetic resonance image segmentation method. This is based on adaptive multi-level thresholding to classify the images into variable number brain tissue classes of interest. The method includes a denoising and enhancement image preprocessing stage. After that, the image histogram is computed and smoothed using a pyramid filter. Then, this histogram is differenced to determine a list of peaks and valleys (i.e. local minima) on it. As the number of considered tissue classes to segment is the number of searched histogram thresholds plus one, the histogram thresholds were chosen using the values of valleys that minimize the classification errors. The proposed method was used to segment four tissue classes (i.e. white matter, gray matter, cerebrospinal fluid and background, respectively) in a collection of synthetic brain MR slice from BrainWeb database. The method was compared to other two implemented segmentation approaches: one based on Gaussian mixture models and other one based on k-means clustering. Our multi-level thresholding segmentation algorithm produced equivalent correct classification results (above 95%) than the other two compared methods of the literature.

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