A robust statistical method for brain magnetic resonance image segmentation

Abstract

In this paper, a robust statistical model-based brain MRI image segmentation method is presented. The MRI images are modeled by Gaussian mixture model. This method, based on the statistical model, approximately finds the maximum a posteriori estimation of the segmentation and estimates the model parameters from the image data. The proposed strategy for segmentation is based on the EM and FCM algorithm. The prior model parameters are estimated via EM algorithm. Then, in order to obtain a good segmentation and speed up the convergence rate, initial estimates of the parameters were done by FCM algorithm. The proposed image segmentation methods have been tested using phantom simulated MRI data. The experimental results show the proposed method is effective and robust. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.