Multi-phase level set method for precise segmentation and correction of brain MRI.

Medical image segmentation as an earlier application field in image segmentation is the key technology of medical image analysis and is also a key point and difficulty in clinical application. This paper proposes an accurate and robust active contour model based on the four-phase level set for medical MR images. First we define a new energy functional by combining the data term and the length term, where the data term is defined by transforming the energy functional of the multiplicative intrinsic component optimization (MICO) model into the level set framework after adding an edge detector function. Then, when we minimize the energy functional, we use the split Bregman method to improve the convergence speed. To test the performance of our model, we do lots of experiments according to the different brain MR images, which show that even under the severe influence of bias field or shadows, our model can still segment these images well, and our model is robust to the initial contours and noise. Moreover, our model is compared with the MICO model by experimental results and the numerical values, concluding that our model is better than the MICO model no matter in segmentation accuracy or in correction effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]