Segmentation of brain magnetic resonance angiography images based on MAP–MRF with multi-pattern neighborhood system and approximation of regularization coefficient

Abstract

Existing maximum a posteriori probability and Markov random field (MRF) models have limitations associated with: (1) the ordinary neighborhood system being unable to differentiate subtle changes due to several-to-one correspondence within the neighborhood; and (2) difficulty finding an appropriate parameter to balance between the spatial context and the data likelihood. Aiming at overcoming the limitations and applications to segmentation of cerebral vessels from magnetic resonance angiography images, we have proposed (1) a multi-pattern neighborhood system and corresponding energy equation to enable the MRF model for segmenting fine cerebral vessels with complicated context; and (2) an iterative approximation algorithm based on the maximum pseudo-likelihood and the space coding mode for the automatic parameter estimation of high level model of MRF. In the implementation, two computational strategies have been employed to speed up: the candidate space of cerebral vessels based on a threshold of the response to multi-scale filtering, and parallel computation of major equations. Three phantoms simulating segmentation challenges of vessels have been devised to quantitatively validate the algorithm. In addition, 10 three-dimensional clinical data sets have been used to validate the algorithm qualitatively. It has been shown that the proposed method could yield smaller error, improve the spatial resolution of MRF model, and better balance the smoothing and data likelihood than the traditional trial-and-error estimation. Comparative studies have shown that the proposed method is better than the 3 segmentation algorithms (Hassouna et al., 2006; Hao et al., 2008; Gao et al., 2011) in terms of segmentation accuracy, robustness to noise and varying curvatures as well as radii.