Level Set Modeling and Segmentation of DT-MRI Brain Data

Leonid Zhukov, Ken Museth, David Breen, Ross Whitakert, Alan H. Barr

 Department of Computer Science,California Institute of Technology
Mail Code 350-74, Pasadena, CA 91125-7400

 School of Computing, University of Utah
3190 MEB, Salt Lake City, UT 84112-9205

Abstract:

Segmentation of anatomical regions of the brain is one of the fundamental problems in medical image analysis. It is traditionally solved by iso-surfacing or through the use of active contours/deformable models on a gray-scale MRI data. In this paper we develop a technique that uses anisotropic diffusion properties of brain tissue available from DT-MRI to segment out brain structures. We develop a computational pipeline starting from raw diffusion tensor data, through computation of invariant anisotropy measures to construction of geometric models of the brain structures. This provides an environment for user-controlled 3D segmentation of DT-MRI datasets. We use a level set approach to remove noise from the data and to produce smooth, geometric models. We apply our technique to DT-MRI data of a human subject and build models of the isotropic and strongly anisotropic regions of the brain. Once geometric models have been constructed they may be combined to study spatial relationships and quantitatively analyzed to produce the volume and surface area of the segmented regions.