Automatic Segmentation of MR Images based on Adaptive Anisotropic Filtering

A novel approach to the detection of multiple sclerosis (MS) lesions is presented, which uses an adaptive formula-tion of the anisotropic diffusion and fuzzy-c-means (FCM) clustering. As opposite to previous works of the same au-thors, FCM runs only on PD weighted slices that, for each examination, are composed in a unique data set. Images are preprocessed with an anisotropic diffusion filter whose dif-fusion function has been adaptively optimized to aggregate pixels belonging to lesions and cut off all the others. Adap-tivity is used to achieve significant noise reduction. Detailed description of the proposed approach is presented, along with first experimental results. 1