A Watershed Method for MR Renography Segmentation

MR renography has emerged as a promising radiological measure of renal function. The MRR image segmentation has been the important technology in kidney image processing and analysis. Due to the rapid calculation speed, watershed transform is developed rapidly in image segmentation field in recent years. But it has an inevitable over-segmentation problem in the application. In this paper, a new watershed method for MR renography image segmentation has been proposed. To achieve smoothing and enhancing the contrast in image preprocessing, the total variation model is used as nonlinear filter. The results of experiments performed on real medical MRI kidney images show that the new approach solves the over-segmentation problem effectively, and it can identify the kidney regions clearly.