This paper evaluates strategies to combine multiple segmentations of the same image, generated for example by different segmentation methods or by different human experts. Three methods are compared, each estimating and using a different level of prior knowledge about the segmenters. These three methods are: simple label averaging (no priors), a binary expectation maximization (EM) method with ...

We propose an automated method for segmentation of brain tissues in longitudinal MR images. In the proposed method, images acquired at each time point are first separately segmented into white matter, gray matter, and cerebrospinal fluid by bias correction embedded fuzzy c-means. Intensities differences are then defined as similarities of each voxel to the cluster centroids. After being normali...

Due to intensity overlaps between interested objects caused by noise and intensity inhomogeneity, image segmentation is still an open problem. In this paper, we propose a framework to segment images in the well-known image model in which intensities of the observed image are viewed as a product of the true image and the bias field. In the proposed framework, a CUDA accelerated non-local means d...

This paper presents a new technique for assessing the accuracy of segmentation algorithms, applied to the performance evaluation of brain editing and brain tissue segmentation algorithms for magnetic resonance images. We propose performance evaluation criteria derived from the use of the realistic digital brain phantom Brainweb. This 'ground truth' allows us to build distance-based discrepancy ...

As improvements in cortical surface modeling allowed accurate cortical topology in brain imaging studies, surface-based methods for the analysis of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) were introduced to overcome the topological deficiency of commonly used volume-based methods. The difference between the two methods is mainly due to the smoothing techniques applied. For practical applic...

Magnetic resonance fingerprinting (MRF) is a novel technique that allows for the fast and simultaneous quantification of multiple tissue properties, progressing from qualitative images, such as T1or T2-weighted images commonly used in clinical routines, to quantitative parametric maps. MRF consists of two main elements: accelerated pseudorandom acquisitions that create unique signal evolutions ...

In medical imaging, low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and/or contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) often cause many image processing algorithms to perform poorly. Postacquisition image filtering is an important off-line image processing approach widely employed to enhance the SNR and CNR. A major drawback of many filtering techniques is image degradation by diffusing/blurring edges and/or fine structures...

A robust multi-modal tool, for automated registration, bias correction, and tissue classification, has been implemented for large-scale heterogeneous multi-site longitudinal MR data analysis. This work focused on improving the an iterative optimization framework between bias-correction, registration, and tissue classification inspired from previous work. The primary contributions are robustness...