Radial basis function-based image segmentation using a receptive field

The paper presents a novel method for CT head image automatic segmentation. The images are obtained from patients having a spontaneous intra-cerebral brain hemorrhage (ICH). The results of the segmentation are images partitioned into five regions of interest corresponding to four tissue classes (skull, brain, calcifications and ICH) and background. Once the images are segmented it is possible to calculate various hemorrhage region parameters such as size, position, etc. The segmentation is performed in three major steps. In the first phase feature extraction and normalization is performed using a receptive field (RF). Experiments were performed to determine the optimal RF structure. Pixels are classified in the second phase using the radial basis function (RBF) artificial neural network. Experiments with different RBF network topologies were performed in order to determine the optimal basis functions, network size and a training algorithm. The segmentation results obtained using the RBF network were compared with results obtained by multi-layer perceptron neural network (MLP). In the third phase the image regions obtained by the RBF network were labeled using an expert system. Experiments have shown that the proposed method successfully performs image segmentation.