Title
Automatic histogram-based segmentation of white matter hyperintensities using 3D FLAIR images
Abstract
White matter hyperintensities are known to play a role in the cognitive decline experienced by patients suffering from neurological diseases. Therefore, accurately detecting and monitoring these lesions is of importance. Automatic methods for segmenting white matter lesions typically use multimodal MRI data. Furthermore, many methods use a training set to perform a classification task or to determine necessary parameters. In this work, we describe and evaluate an unsupervised segmentation method that is based solely on the histogram of FLAIR images. It approximates the histogram by a mixture of three Gaussians in order to find an appropriate threshold for white matter hyperintensities. We use a context-sensitive Expectation-Maximization method to determine the Gaussian mixture parameters. The segmentation is subsequently corrected for false positives using the knowledge of the location of typical FLAIR artifacts. A preliminary validation with the ground truth on 6 patients revealed a Similarity Index of 0.73 +/- 0.10, indicating that the method is comparable to others in the literature which require multimodal MRI and/or a preliminary training step.
Year
DOI
Venue
2012
10.1117/12.911327
Proceedings of SPIE
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Brain,white matter hyperintensities,MRI,FLAIR,Gaussian Mixture Model
Conference
8315
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
0277-786X
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Rita Simões131.42
Cornelis H. Slump218950.31
christoph moenninghoff300.68
isabel wanke400.68
martha dlugaj500.34
christian weimar600.68