An 3D MRI Unsupervised Graph-based Skull Stripping Algorithm.

Brain tumours and strokes are increasingly common, even from a young age. For this reason preliminary screenings, such as MRI scans, are crucial steps in detecting the abnormalities and finding a treatment. Given the increasing number of people developing different brain problems, there is a need in developing automated segmentation systems. Regardless the various methods presented in the literature, the lack of ground truth images determines the researchers to move towards unsupervised techniques. This paper presents an modified graph-based unsupervised brain segmentation method that uses a minimal spanning tree to segment brain from non-brain tissue. The original method uses human intervention for node selection. The aim is to eliminate human intervention and reduce the computational time required for brain segmentation. The presented method was compared with the original one in two ways: by resizing and scaling the images, and using images without any pre-processing step. Experimental results were obtained on the NFBS dataset and in both experiments the proposed approach delivers better results, both visually and numerically. Performance measures have improved, leading to better overall segmentation. The new method increased the precision and dice coefficient by 20%, resulting in a more accurate segmentation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]