Segmentation of multiple sclerosis lesions from MR brain images using the principles of fuzzy-connectedness and artificial neuron networks

Segmentation is an important step for the diagnosis of multiple sclerosis. In this paper, a method for segmentation of multiple sclerosis lesions from magnetic resonance (MR) brain image is proposed. The proposed method combines the strengths of two existing techniques: fuzzy connectedness and artificial neural networks. From the input MR brain image, the fuzzy connectedness algorithm is used to extract segments which are parts of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), white matter (WM) or gray matter (GM). Segments of the MRI image which are not extracted as part of CSF, WM or GM are processed morphologically, and features are computed for each of them. Then these computed features are fed to a trained artificial neural network, which decides whether a segment is a part of a lesion or not. The results of our method show 90% correlation with the expert´s manual work.