Hybrid Approach Towards Removal of Streak Artifacts and Region Identification in Brain Radiology

Abstract

A streak artifact is an anomaly seen in the CT image of the brain. It is like a dark bands or streaks appearing in an image that is not present in the original region. The appearance of these artifacts leads to misinterpretation of medical diagnosis. Under sampling, photon starvation, motion and beam hardening are some of the reasons for occurrence of streak artifacts. These type of artifacts commonly occur in the posterior fossa of the brain. This paper mainly focuses on region shape and texture identification and removal of streak artifacts exists in the brain image. Initially morphological operators and fuzzy k-means algorithms are used to identify the different regions in the CT brain image. Each region is treated as a single image and features are extracted for each image. The feature descriptors are constructed using region properties and statistical features. The extracted features are compared with threshold brain image to identify the dark bands of streak artifacts.