3D brain tissue selection and segmentation from MRI

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a visualizing method used in radiology that enables viewing internal structures of the body. Using several mathematical methods with data retrieved from MRI it is possible to quantify the brain compartment volume, which has many applications in cognitive, clinical and comparative neurosciences. This paper introduces a new fully automatic method, which can measure the volume of brain tissue using scans obtained from MRI devices. The method introduced in this paper was trained on data taken from 12 patients and the trained result was validated on other independent data obtained from 10 patients and compared to a human expert´s accuracy. The result achieves 99.407 % +/- 0.062 voxel error accuracy, which is comparable to results achieved by humans (99.540 % + 0.0775) but in a significantly shorter time and without the need of human involvement.