An Efficient Computational Approach for the Detection of MR Brain Tissues in the Presence of Noise and Intensity Inhomogeneity

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The automatic detection of brain tissues such as White Matter (WM), Gray Matter (GM), and Cerebrospinal Fluid (CSF) from the MR images of the brain using segmentation is of immense interest for the early detection and diagnosing various brain-related diseases. MR imaging technology is one of the best and most reliable ways of studying the brain. Segmentation of MR images is a challenging task due to various artifacts such as noise, intensity inhomogeneity, partial volume effects and elemental texture of the image. This work proposes a region based, efficient and modern energy minimization process called as Anisotropic Multiplicative Intrinsic Component Optimization (AMICO) for the brain image segmentation in the presence of noise and intensity inhomogeneity to separate different tissues. This algorithm uses an efficient Anisotropic diffusion filter to decrease the noise. The denoised image gets segmented after the correction of intensity inhomogeneity by the MICO algorithm. The algorithm decomposes the MR brain image as two multiplicative intrinsic components, called as the component of the true image which represents the physical properties of the brain tissue and the component of bias field that is related to intensity inhomogeneity. By optimizing the values of these two components using an efficient energy minimization technique, correction of intensity inhomogeneity and segmentation of the tissues can be achieved simultaneously. Performance evaluation and the comparison with some existing methods have validated the remarkable performance of AMICO in terms of efficiency of segmentation of brain images in the presence of noise and intensity inhomogeneity.