A Modified Skull-Stripping Method Based on Morphological Processing

In the paper, we first discussed the method of skull-stripping based on edge detection in detail. The method can extract the brain tissue from a normal MRI (magnetic resonance image) quickly and accurately. But if there are tumors at the boundary of the brain tissues whose intensity is different with normal tissues´, some unwanted edge will appear while detecting the boundary of the brain tissue. So, we proposed a modified method to solve this issue in this paper. Our procedure consists of three steps. First,the MRI is processed with an anisotropic diffusion filter to encourage intraregion smoothing in preference to smoothing across the boundaries. And then find the region between the skull and the brain tissue using thresholding methods. It is difficult to remove the unwanted edges directly,but we found that when we processed it using a skeletonization algorithm, the unwanted edges became the branches on the skeleton of the region. Finally, use a sequence of morphological and connected component operator to make sure the region is closed. The closed region is that we wish for. Results on 2-D MR images are provided.