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Level Set Formulation Based on Edge and Region Information with Application to Accurate Lesion Segmentation of Brain Magnetic Resonance Images

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Abstract

Magnetic resonance images have great significance for doctors’ analysis and diagnosis of diseases. One difficulty in segmenting magnetic resonance images is associated with the intensity inhomogeneity. In this paper, we propose an improved active contour model combining local and global information dynamically to segment images with intensity inhomogeneity. Besides, the atlas term is added into our energy functional, which improves the segmentation accuracy by restricting the segmented range around the location of the given atlas and making the contour move toward a position near the atlas. In this paper, we first present the multi-phase formulation of our model. Then, our model is applied to segment a total of 35 different brain magnetic resonance images with lesions. We also compare the performance of our model with other models, which can handle inhomogeneous images to some extent. Experimental results demonstrate that our model has promising performance for these challenging brain magnetic resonance images. Accuracy, efficiency and robustness of the proposed model have also been demonstrated by the numerical results and comparisons with other models.

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Acknowledgements

This work is supported by Shenzhen Fundamental Research Plan (No. JCYJ20160505175141489).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen, China

    Yunyun Yang, Wenjing Jia & Xiu Shu

  2. Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, China

    Boying Wu

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  1. Yunyun Yang
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  2. Wenjing Jia
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  3. Xiu Shu
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  4. Boying Wu
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Correspondence to Yunyun Yang.

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Yang, Y., Jia, W., Shu, X. et al. Level Set Formulation Based on Edge and Region Information with Application to Accurate Lesion Segmentation of Brain Magnetic Resonance Images. J Optim Theory Appl 182, 797–815 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10957-018-01451-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10957-018-01451-1

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