Segmentation of Focal Brain Lesions

Chalopin C.1, Hojjatoleslami A.1, Kruggel F.2, Yang F.2

1 Max-Planck-Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, Leipzig, 2 University of California, Irvine

Focal brain lesions are a consequence of head trauma, cerebral infarcts or intracerebral hemorrhages. In clinical practice, MR imaging is commonly used to reveal them. The segmentation task consists of finding the lesion borders. This problem is non-trivial because the lesion border may be fuzzy or connected to other intracranial compartments with similar intensities. A new method for the automatic segmentation of unilateral lesions was developed: The signal statistics of multichannel MR are examined w.r.t. the first-order mirror symmetry of the brain. Details are found in reference [Kruggel, 2004], where properties of the algorithm are evaluated on synthetic and real MRI data.

lesion_example

Lesions considered here are confined to a single hemisphere with a generally healthy area on the corresponding contralateral side. Image of a patient suffering from a cerebral infarction in the anterior supply area of the middle cerebral artery.

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