A novel hybrid atlas-free hierarchical graph-based segmentation of newborn brain MRI using wavelet filter banks

Abstract

Objective: The newborn brain MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) tissue segmentation plays a vital part in assessment of primary brain growth. In the newborn stage (nearly less than 28 days old), in T1- as well as T2-weighted MR images similar levels of intensity are exhibited by WM and GM, makes segmentation of the tissue extremely challenging. In this newborn stage for tissue segmentation, very few methods are developed. Hence the development of accurate brain tissue segmentation of neonate is prime objective of this paper.Methods: In this research work, we propose a novel hybrid atlas-free hierarchical graph-based tissue segmentation method for newborn infants. Wavelet filter banks are a class of deep models wherein filters and local neighborhood processes are used alternately for efficient segmentation on the raw input images, and fuzzy-based SVM (support vector machine) is used for precise tissue classification.Results: Specifically, from T1, T2 images multimodality information are used as inputs and then as outputs the segmentation maps are generated. The proposed approach considerably outperforms preceding methods of tissue segmentation as reflected in results. With this approach, the newborn MRI images that are even suffered from noise, poor resolution or the low contrasted images are also segmented more effectively with precision of 90% and sensitivity 98%.Conclusion: In addition, our findings indicate that the incorporation of multi-modality image led to significant improvements in performance. Thus, the proposed work effectively tackles the unreliability as well as the other issues faced with the prior methodologies with an interactive accurate segmentation outline.