A segmentation technique for cerebral NMR images

Presents a method of automatic segmentation of cerebral anatomic regions in NMR images. NMR image segmentation is of great interest. The morphological studies are easier and anomalies can be detected as diagnostic indicators of disease. The automatic approach described here works without a priori knowledge. It increases the contrast between grey and white matter by using a local histogram equalization. Then it uses morphological operators to remove the noise from the image and then to refine the detected anatomic regions. This method has been applied to more than 40 images. Each time, the result was as good as that obtained with manual segmentation