Brain Extraction of MR Images

Extracting the brain from magnetic resonance imaging head scans is an essential preprocessing step of which the accuracy greatly affects subsequent image analysis. The currently popular Brain Extraction Tool produces a brain mask which may be too smooth for practical use to reduce the accuracy. This paper presents a novel and indirect brain extraction method based on non-brain tissue segmentation. Based on ITK, the proposed method allows a non-brain contour by using region growing to match with the original image naturally and extract the brain tissue. Experiments on two set of MRI data and 2D brain image in horizontal plane and 3D brain model indicate successful extraction of brain tissue from a head.