Atlas-based segmentation of brain MR images using least square support vector machines

Abstract

This study presents an automatic model based technique for brain tissue segmentation from cerebral magnetic resonance (MR) images. In this paper, support vector machine (SVM) based classifier, as a new and powerful kind of supervised machine learning with high generalization characteristics, is employed. Here, least-square SVM (LS-SVM) in conjunction with brain probabilistic atlas as a priori information is applied to obtain class probabilities for three tissues of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), white matter (WM) and grey matter (GM). The entire process of brain segmentation is performed in an iterative procedure, so that the probabilistic maps of brain tissues will be updated at any iteration. The quantitative and qualitative results indicate excellent performance of the applied method.