Automatic extraction of cortical gray matter by geodesic contours

Automatic quantitative analysis of brain tissues has a high importance. However, lack of high precision still makes results unreliable. This paper presents a novel system which separates cortical GM from WM. It imitates human perception like edge detection algorithms but recovers their disability in segmentation. System is fully automatic and unsupervised. Fastened segments of geodesic passive contours (FSG) are utilized and the perceptive sensitivity to edges is imitated. This nature of the solution proved to treat the inhomogeneity and noise problems well. The technique is tested on both real and synthetic databases and compared with widely used software of SPM and works faster. Our technique succeeded in getting average misclassification rate of 4.8% for WM and correct GM-WM boundary rate of 77% being very close to experts´ agreement.