Abstract
Measurement of cortical thickness using human brain magnetic resonance (MR) imaging can assist physicians in quantifying cerebral atrophy. Most of the conventional measurement methods assign the same class to all pixels with a similar MR signal independent of their locations, and are therefore unsuitable for MR images that have strong intensity nonuniformity (INU) artifact. We propose an automated method that locally segments the cerebral cortex using an adapted fuzzy spatial model representing the transit of MR signals from the cerebral cortex to the white matter. This method assigns fuzzy degrees belonging to brain tissues using the adaptive fuzzy spatial model for local intensity transition from the cerebral cortex to inside the cerebrum. We also introduce an evaluation method of cortex segmentation algorithms that consists of reproducibility, quantitative, and qualitative tests; we use this method to evaluate and discuss the proposed segmentation method in comparison with the conventional method.
