An important problem in medical image analysis is the segmentation of anatomical regions of interest. Once regions of interest are segmented, one can extract shape, appearance, and structural features that can be analyzed for disease diagnosis or treatment evaluation. Diffusion tensor magnetic resonance imaging (DT-MRI) is a relatively new medical imaging modality that captures unique water diffusion properties and fiber orientation information of the imaged tissues. In this paper, we extend the interactive multidimensional graph cuts segmentation technique to operate on DT-MRI data by utilizing latest advances in tensor calculus and diffusion tensor dissimilarity metrics. The user interactively selects certain tensors as object ("obj") or background ("bkg") to provide hard constraints for the segmentation. Additional soft constraints incorporate information about both regional tissue diffusion as well as boundaries between tissues of different diffusion properties. Graph cuts are used to find globally optimal segmentation of the underlying 3D DT-MR image among all segmentations satisfying the constraints. We develop a graph structure from the underlying DT-MR image with the tensor voxels corresponding to the graph vertices and with graph edge weights computed using either Log-Euclidean or the J-divergence tensor dissimilarity metric. The topology of our segmentation is unrestricted and both obj and bkg segments may consist of several isolated parts. We test our method on synthetic DT data and apply it to real 2D and 3D MRI, providing segmentations of the corpus callosum in the brain and the ventricles of the heart.
In REF , the GC strategy is adapted for segmenting anatomical brain regions of interest in diffusion tensor MRI (DT-MRI).
DT-MRI segmentation using graph cuts
SPIE Medical Imaging
Computer Science Physics Mathematics Engineering