Automatic Ischemic Stroke Lesion Segmentation in Multi-spectral MRI Images Using Random Forests Classifier

This paper presents an automated segmentation framework for ischemic stroke lesion segmentation in multi-spectral MRI images. The framework is based on a random forests (RF), which is an ensemble learning technique that generates several classifiers and combines their results in order to make decisions. In RF, we employ several meaningful features such as intensities, entropy, gradient etc. to classify the voxels in multi-spectral MRI images. The segmentation framework is validated on MICCAI 2015 ISLES challenge training data sets. The performance of the framework is evaluated relative to the manual segmentation (ground truth). The experimental results demonstrate the robustness of the segmentation framework, and that it achieves reasonable segmentation accuracy for segmenting the sub-acute ischemic stroke lesion in multi-spectral MRI images.