An improved EM algorithm for statistical segmentation of brain MRI

  • Authors:

  • Yong Yang

  • Affiliations:

  • School of Information Management, Jiangxi University of Finance and Economics, Nanchang, P.R. China

  • Venue:
  • IDEAL'06 Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Intelligent Data Engineering and Automated Learning
  • Year:
  • 2006

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

To overcome the limitations of standard expectation maximization (EM) algorithm, an improved EM algorithm is proposed. Based on this algorithm, a novel statistical approach for segmentation of brain magnetic resonance (MR) image data is presented in this paper, which involves three steps. Firstly, after pre-processing the image with the curvature anisotropic diffusion filter, the background (BG) and brain masks of the image are obtained by applying a combination approach of thresholding with morphology. Secondly, the connected threshold region growing technique is employed to get the preliminary results of white matter (WM), gray matter (GM) and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) on a brain MRI. Finally, the previous results are served as the priori knowledge for the improved EM algorithm to segment the brain MRI. The performance of the proposed method is compared with those of standard EM algorithm and the popular used fuzzy-C means (FCM) segmentation. Experimental results show our approach is effective, robust and significantly faster than the conventional EM based method.