Automatic extraction of the intracranial cavity on transverse MR brain images

The morphometric analysis of various normal and pathological brain structures is the focus of interest in the study of a number of neuropsychiatric disorders such as Alzheimer´s disease (AD) and multi infarct dementia (MID). These studies require the computation of the relative volumes and areas of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), white matter, gray matter, and white matter lesions (WML) of several types, which are seen in magnetic resonance (MR) images. Such quantitative analyses are facilitated by the extraction of the intracranial cavity from the images, a process that can be demanding and error prone when performed manually. In this paper a robust method is presented that permits its automatic extraction from transverse T2-weighted MR images. The algorithm has been tested on a total of 76 images and the results are discussed