Brain tissues segmentation for diagnosis of Alzheimer-type Dementia

We proposed a segmentation method of brain tissues on T2-weighted MR frontal image. In our previous work, we showed an image diagnosis support system for Alzheimer-type Dementia that extracts temporal lobe regions and an intracranial region as regions of interest (ROI) from a T2-weighted MR frontal image and uses the cerebral atrophy rates at the ROI. In this paper, we specifically discuss segmentation of brain tissues which are used for calculation of atrophy rate. We proposed a brain tissue segmentation method using two kinds of unsupervised neural networks: Self-Organizing Maps (SOMs) and Fuzzy Adaptive Resonance Theory (ART). The performance of proposed method was tested in two brain MR images used in daily diagnosis. Proposed method could segment CSF accurately with continuity of brain tissues.