Extraction Method of Brain Regions Using Balloon models for Diagnosis Support of Alzheimer-Type Dementia

We intend to construct an image diagnosis support system for Alzheimer-type Dementia (ATD) that extracts temporal lobe regions and an intracranial region as interest regions from a T2-weighted MR frontal image and uses the cerebral atrophy rates at the regions of interest. In this paper, we specifically discuss extraction of regions of interest. The proposed method consists of three steps. First, we emphasis features of an obscure T2-weighted brain image. Second, we set a first contour that approximates a shape of the temporal lobe region to a triangle and apply Balloon models with the added presser force that push the initial contour outside in order to extract a temporal lobe region. Finally, we extract an intracranial region using extracted temporal lobe regions. Our proposed method can extract regions of interest along individual brain features by only a few interactions with three points. We demonstrate the potential of our method using actual diagnosis images. Moreover, we show a possibility to use of atrophy rate at the regions of interest for diagnosis support of ATD.