Automatic brain segmentation using artificial neural networks with shape context

Segmenting brain tissue from MR scans is thought to be highly beneficial for brain abnormality diagnosis, prognosis monitoring, and treatment evaluation. Many automatic or semi-automatic methods have been proposed in the literature in order to reduce the requirement of user intervention, but the level of accuracy in most cases is still inferior to that of manual segmentation. We propose a new brain segmentation method that integrates volumetric shape models into a supervised artificial neural network (ANN) framework. This is done by running a preliminary level-set based statistical shape fitting process guided by the image intensity and then passing the signed distance maps of several key structures to the ANN as feature channels, in addition to the conventional spatial-based and intensity-based image features. The so-called shape context information is expected to help the ANN to learn local adaptive classification rules instead of applying universal rules directly on the local appearance features. The proposed method was tested on a public datasets available within the open MICCAI grand challenge (MRBrainS13). The obtained average Dice coefficient were 84.78%, 88.47%, 82.76%, 95.37% and 97.73% for gray matter (GM), white matter (WM), cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), brain (WM + GM) and intracranial volume respectively. Compared with other methods tested on the same dataset, the proposed method achieved competitive results with comparatively shorter training time.