Partial Volume Segmentation of Cerebral MRI Scans with Mixture Model Clustering

A mixture model clustering algorithm is presented for robust MRI brain image segmentation in the presence of partial volume averaging. The method uses additional classes to represent partial volume voxels of mixed tissue type in the data with their probability distributions modeled accordingly. The image model also allows for tissue-dependent variance values and voxel neighborhood information is taken into account in the clustering formulation. The final result is the estimated fractional amount of each tissue type present within a voxel in addition to the label assigned to the voxel. A parallel implementation of the method is evaluated using both synthetic and real MRI data.