Automatic symmetry-integrated brain injury detection in MRI sequences

Abstract

This paper presents a fully automated symmetry-integrated brain injury detection method for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) sequences. One of the limitations of current injury detection methods often involves a large amount of training data or a prior model that is only applicable to a limited domain of brain slices, with low computational efficiency and robustness. Our proposed approach can detect injuries from a wide variety of brain images since it makes use of symmetry as a dominant feature, and does not rely on any prior models and training phases. The approach consists of the following steps: (a) symmetry integrated segmentation of brain slices based on symmetry affinity matrix, (b) computation of kurtosis and skewness of symmetry affinity matrix to find potential asymmetric regions, (c) clustering of the pixels in symmetry affinity matrix using a 3D relaxation algorithm, (d) fusion of the results of (b) and (c) to obtain refined asymmetric regions, (e) Gaussian mixture model for unsupervised classification of potential asymmetric regions as the set of regions corresponding to brain injuries. Experimental results are carried out to demonstrate the efficacy of the approach.