A vessel segmentation method for MRA data based on probabilistic mixture model

Accurate segmentation and visualization of cerebral vessels have important significance to the diagnosis and treatment of relevant brain diseases. However, some segmentation algorithms are only competent for the standard data. In this paper, a segmentation method based on probabilistic mixture model is proposed to solve clinical problems. Through histogram analysis of the magnetic resonance angiography (MRA) data offered by Guangzhou General Hospital of the Chinese PLA, a mixture model formed by six probabilistic distributions (one Exponential, one Rayleigh, and four Normal distributions) was built to fit the histogram curve. Least squares and expectation maximization (EM) algorithms have been used for parameters estimation. At last, the segmentation was enhanced by maximum a posteriori probability (MAP) and Markov random field (MRF) algorithm. The effectiveness of the proposed method has been validated by segmentation tests on a series of clinical MRA data with good performance.