Brain MRI tissue classification based on local Markov random fields

A new method for tissue classification of brain magnetic resonance images (MRI) of the brain is proposed. The method is based on local image models where each models the image content in a subset of the image domain. With this local modeling approach, the assumption that tissue types have the same characteristics over the brain needs not to be evoked. This is important because tissue type characteristics, such as T1 and T2 relaxation times and proton density, vary across the individual brain and the proposed method offers improved protection against intensity non-uniformity artifacts that can hamper automatic tissue classification methods in brain MRI. A framework in which local models for tissue intensities and Markov Random Field (MRF) priors are combined into a global probabilistic image model is introduced. This global model will be an inhomogeneous MRF and it can be solved by standard algorithms such as iterative conditional modes. The division of the whole image domain into local brain regions possibly having different intensity statistics is realized via sub-volume probabilistic atlases. Finally, the parameters for the local intensity models are obtained without supervision by maximizing the weighted likelihood of a certain finite mixture model. For the maximization task, a novel genetic algorithm almost free of initialization dependency is applied. The algorithm is tested on both simulated and real brain MR images. The experiments confirm that the new method offers a useful improvement of the tissue classification accuracy when the basic tissue characteristics vary across the brain and the noise level of the images is reasonable. The method also offers better protection against intensity non-uniformity artifact than the corresponding method based on a global (whole image) modeling scheme.