Abstract
Neurodegenerative disorders are commonly characterized by atrophy of the brain which is caused by neuronal loss. Ventricles are one of the prominent structures in the brain; their shape changes, due to their content, the cerebrospinal fluid. Analyzing the morphological changes of ventricles, aids in the diagnosis of atrophy, for which the region of interest needs to be separated from the background. This study presents a modified distance regularized level set evolution segmentation method, incorporating regional intensity information. The proposed method is implemented for segmenting ventricles from brain images for normal and atrophy subjects of magnetic resonance imaging and computed tomography images. Results of the proposed method were compared with ground truth images and produced sensitivity in the range of 65%–90%, specificity in the range of 98%–99%, and accuracy in the range of 95%–98%. Peak signal to noise ratio and structural similarity index were also used as performance measures for determining segmentation accuracy: 95% and 0.95, respectively. The parameters of level set formulation vary for different datasets. An optimization procedure was followed to fine tune parameters. The proposed method was found to be efficient and robust against noisy images. The proposed method is adaptive and multimodal.
Highlights
The brain gets affected by multiple factors; degenerative disorders are one of them
It is based on the active contour model concept, where the curves are represented as zero level set, with a function of higher dimension, which is called as the level set function (LSF) [22, 23]
Twenty computed tomography (CT) images and twenty magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) T1 weighted images of atrophy subjects were included in the dataset
Summary
The brain gets affected by multiple factors; degenerative disorders are one of them. Degenerative disorders could be a result of environment changes, food habits, work depression, hereditary, traumatic injury or caused from the effect of other neurological disorders. Degenerative disorders in the brain render the subject unable to perform their activities of daily living such as communication, movement, balancing their body while walking and sometimes vital functions such as respiration and functioning of the heart. Atrophy in the brain or cerebral atrophy is a symptom or a form or stage which is caused by many diseases. The brain starts to shrink because of neuronal loss [1, 2]. Atrophy affects all structures of the brain, but in different ratios. For the diagnosis of atrophy, certain regions or structures of
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