Segmentation of the amygdalo-hippocampal complex by competitive region growing [MRI analysis]

Semi-automatic segmentation of amygdala and hippocampus is of major interest to neurologists but it is a challenge to numerical image analysis techniques because of intrinsic complexity of those structures. We introduce a new method to approach this problem with Markovian region growing. As we are concerned by segmenting atrophic structures, we did not use shape priors, but constrained the growth with relational and weak geometric priors. The major relational constraint is given by the simultaneous segmentation of hippocampus and amygdala. The algorithm runs quickly on a basic workstation with satisfactory results on both structures.