A NOVEL APPROACH FOR EFFICIENT SKULL STRIPPING USING MORPHOLOGICAL RECONSTRUCTION AND THRESHOLDING TECHNIQUES

Brain is the part of the central nervous system located in skull. For the diagnosis of human brain bearing tumour, skull stripping plays an important pre-processing role. Skull stripping is the process separating brain and non-brain tissues of the head which is the critical processing step in the analysis of neuroimaging data. Though various algorithms have been proposed to address this problem, challenges remain. In this paper a new efficient skull stripping method for magnetic resonance images (MRI) is proposed. This method adopts a two-step approach; in the first step an improved systematic application of morphological reconstructions operations is done for the brain image and in the second step, a thresholding based technique is used to extract the brain inside the skull. This paper experimented on Axial PD and FLAIR MRI brain images