A fast approach to segmentation of PET brain images for extraction of features

Position Emission Tomography (PET) is increasingly applied in the diagnosis and surgery in patients thanks to its ability of showing nearly all types of lesions including tumour and head injury. However, due to its natures of low resolution and different appearances as a result of different tracers, segmentation of lesions presents great challenges. In this study, a simple and robust algorithm is proposed via additive colour mixture approach. Comparison with the other two methods including Bayesian classified and geodesic active contour is also performed, demonstrating the proposed colouring approach has many advantages in terms of speed, robustness, and user intervention. This research has many medical applications including pharmaceutical trials, decision making for drug treatment or surgery and patients follow-up and shows potential to the development of content-based image databases when coming to characterise PET images using lesion features