Segmentation of kidney cortex in MRI studies: a constrained morphological 3D h-maxima transform approach

Abstract

This paper presents a method based on the morphological 3D h-maxima transform to segment the kidneys in image volumes obtained by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) after injection of a contrast agent. In clinical settings, manual cropping techniques are heavily relied upon to sever connections to other organs (arteries, liver, spleen, intestines, etc.) but such routine methods tend to produce over-segmented results. We show that automatically generated masks and edge information may be incorporated to guide the segmentation. This approach is particularly useful when severe pathology or congenital abnormalities are present as no prior information about location or appearance is assumed. Results and validation from experiments on a number of selected MR datasets are demonstrated.