A Survey of Brain MRI Image Segmentation Methods and the Issues Involved

Abstract

This paper presents a survey on the existing methods for segmentation of brain MRI images. Segmentation of brain MRI images has been widely used as a preprocessing, for projects that involve analysis and automation, in the field of medical image processing. MRI image segmentation is a challenging task because of the similarity between different tissue structures in the brain image. Also the number of homogeneous regions present in an image varies with the image slice and orientation. The selection of an appropriate method for segmentation therefore depends on the image characteristics. This study has been done in the perspective of enabling the selection of a segmentation method for MRI brain images. The survey has been categorized based on the techniques used in segmentation.