Watersheds in Digital Spaces: An Efficient Algorithm Based on Immersion Simulations
IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence
Handbook of image processing operators
Handbook of image processing operators
A region merging algorithm using mathematical morphology: application to macula detection
ISMM '98 Proceedings of the fourth international symposium on Mathematical morphology and its applications to image and signal processing
Pattern Recognition Letters
Morphological Image Analysis: Principles and Applications
Morphological Image Analysis: Principles and Applications
Morphological grayscale reconstruction in image analysis: applications and efficient algorithms
IEEE Transactions on Image Processing
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The paper presents a morphological method for segmentation of high field Magnetic Resonance (MR) images of the human spinal cord and extraction of the gray matter mask. These images are of low quality and poor contrast. The inhomogeneity of brightness in the image is usually more pronounced than the difference in brightness between the gray matter and the white matter. Due to this inhomogeneity, it is very hard to use watershed segmentation for automatic extraction of the gray matter, and what remains is manual pointing out of a hundred or more regions belonging to the gray matter. However, as shown in the paper, by using the White Top Hat (WTH) transform with a large structuring element, one can correct the images, significantly reducing the inhomogeneity and appropriately modifying individual region statistics. In particular, watershed segmentation is carried out on the original image, whereas region statistics used for region merging are calculated from the corrected image. Then the extraction of the gray matter mask is carried out in a semi-automatic way, with the user pointing out the first region belonging to the gray matter area, and the program selecting subsequent neighboring regions based on the statistics of the regions. The method was tested on images coming from different cross-sections of the spinal cord, and the results indicate that the process of extracting the gray matter mask has been significantly speeded up and improved.