White matter lesion segmentation based on feature joint occurrence probability and chi2 random field theory from magnetic resonance (MR) images

Lesions of the brain’s white matter are common findings in MR examinations of elderly subjects. A fully automatic method for segmenting white matter lesions is proposed here. The joint probability of multimodality MR image intensities is used as a feature to segment lesions, because lesion intensities usually are outliers of the normal tissue intensities and the lesions’ joint intensity probability appears much smaller than those of normal brain tissues. The v2 random field theory is used to determine the significance of a detected lesion and provides a strict statistical analysis to exclude small-sized false-positive lesions. Experimental results show that the automatic segmentation of lesions is in high agreement with manual segmentation, and the v2 random-field-based statistical analysis greatly improves lesion segmentation results. 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.