Fuzzy segmentation of endorrhachis in magnetic resonance images and its fuzzy maximum intensity projection

This paper describes a fuzzy segmentation approach and the rendering technique called fuzzy maximum intensity projection (FMIP) for the endorrhachis in magnetic resonance images. First, we propose a fuzzy segmentation procedure, which assigns the high fuzzy degree for the high possibility to the endorrhachis. Second, we describe FMIP, which projects higher fuzzy membership degrees to brighter values in the 2D plane for every voxel in the volume dataset. This enables us to visualize regions of interest with higher accuracy after the fuzzy segmentation is done in the dataset. The applicability of them is tested in the visualization of the endorrhachis in magnetic resonance images. A comparison between FMIP and MIP shows that FMIP visualizes it more effectively.