Segmentation of Focal Brain Lesions

Abstract. Focal brain lesions are a consequence of head trauma, cerebral infarcts or intracerebral hemorrhages. In clinical practice, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is commonly used to reveal them. The segmentation task consists of find-ing the lesion borders. This problem is non-trivial because the lesion may be con-nected to other intracranial compartments with similar intensities. A new method for the automatic segmentation of unilateral lesions is proposed here. The signal statistics of multichannel MR are examined w.r.t. the first-order mirror symmetry of the brain. The algorithm is discussed in detail, and its properties are evaluated on synthetic and real MRI data.